What They Won't tell You About The Senate's Unemployment Extension Bill

It sounds like something good that only the mean spirited would oppose, right? A bill to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who have been out of work for a very long time.

That is, until you find out this little factoid.

No less than Democrat Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is blocking an amendment to the bill that would require employers to verify the work eligibility of employees using E-Verify program, a simple web-based program that allows employers to check data against records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to make sure they're not hiring illegal aliens.

As Senator Jeff Sessions revealed, Harry Reid won't even allow the amendment to come to a vote, even though congress passed legislation in 1986 making it unlawful for employers to knowingly hire or employ illegal aliens.

The amendment not only would help American citizens in obtaining work, but it would also help curb identity theft and illegal use of other people's Social Security numbers.

Instead, the Democrats would rather leave American citizens dependent on a government dole.They have no interest in creating jobs for out of work Americans or the effect that importing and enabling a huge pool of low skilled workers will have on unemployment, the cost of health care and housing, and depressing worker's wages. That counts for nothing next to their lust for political power.

The hypocrisy of these people in moving their mouths about increasing the minimum wage while making sure that there's going to be a huge population of workers who van be hired for whatever the traffic will bear is despicable. And yes, it's racist, as it disproportionally effects blacks and Hispanics who are legal citizens, as well as legal immigrants.

If the American people re-elect these self-serving apparatchniks, they deserve to live like the serfs Harry Reid and his friends want them to become.

'Middle class warriors'..ri-ight.

How Obama Fudged The Jobs Numbers After His Lousy Debate Performance

Obama and his people really will do or say anything to get re-elected.Even the ObamaBots at MSNBC had trouble swallowing this.

What they're puzzled over is this. Today, the Wall Street Journal reported the following:

"U.S. payrolls, obtained in a separate survey of employers, increased by a seasonally adjusted 114,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expected a gain of 118,000 in payrolls and an 8.1% jobless rate."

So, let me see...a gain of 118,000 would have resulted in an 8.1% rate but a gain of 114,000 resulted in a 7.8% rate? How do fewer jobs actually result in a lower unemployment rate?

Let's dig a bit deeper.

President Obama turns in the worst debate performance of any candidate,let alone a sitting president in modern history and lo and behold!

Just like magic, the Labor Department announces the new jobs report and there's suddenly 114,000 new jobs out of nowhere and a new official unemployment rate of 7.8%, a major drop.

Former GE CEO Jack Welch was just one of the observers who called this totally bogus and tweeted,“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

Let's look at what the Labor Department actually had to say. According to them, job growth rose by 114,000, and the unemployment rate fell to 7.8%. For the sake of argument, let's take those figures as a given, remembering that they're frequently 're-adjusted' later to reflect reality.

But here's the funny thing. The rate the Labor Department is trumpeting is the bogus U-3 rate, which deals strictly with unemployment claims. The more realistic U-6 rate, which takes into account part-time workers who want full-time work,people who are unemployed but not covered by unemployment insurance, like independent contractors or the business person who owned the little store on the main street of your town who just went belly up and closed their doors and lots of discouraged workers who’ve given up looking for work remained exactly the same...at 14.7%.

If the U-3 rate went down, shouldn't the U-6?

Ah, but when you look at the internals you find that the 'job growth' is due to a mysterious surge of 582,000 part-time jobs...and that those numbers were obtained by a phone survey rather than actual payroll data. Now, if the economy was at, say, a 5% growth rate,that would be understandable. In September, people go back to school, some jobs open up. But at a 1.2 growth rate? Something smells.

Even if the numbers are accurate as far as they go, they're obviously being manipulated for the president's political benefit. Even by artificially shrinking the labor force, there are still about 23 million Americans out of work, growth is stagnant, real income is declining and the economy is worsening, not getting better.

Here's a number to chew over.The employment-population ratio shows how many people have jobs as a share of the civilian population. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that number is now 58.7%. In June 2009, when the recession officially ended, it was 59.4%. Before the downturn it was 63%.

This is a recovery only in the unicorn world of President Obama...even using his own Labor Department's numbers.

The August Jobs Report - Awful!

President Obama got a real life rebuke the day after his abysmal acceptance speech in the form of a toxic August jobs report.

As Mitt Romney aptly put it, if yesterday was the party for the Democrats, today is the hangover.

Unemployment remains at 8.1%, and remember, that''s the cooked 'official' U-3 unemployment rate. It accounts only for the people who are receiving or have applied for unemployment benefits and are actively seeking work.

The U-6 rate, which government never trumpets is a lot closer to reality. It includes people no longer actively seeking employment, people who are not covered by unemployment, like people hired as independent contractors or the owner of the small dry cleaning business or restaurant that closed its doors in your neighborhood last week or people let go with not enough quarters of employment to qualify for benefits or from part time and seasonal jobs. That rate as of August 31 2012 is a whopping 14.7 %!

Not only that, but the rate is artificially low because of the historic drop in labor force participation AKA thenumber of people available toworkif the jobs are available. Simply put, if you have a certain amount of water in a glass and then just transfer the water to a smaller glass, the portion of the glass that's filled seems bigger, even if it really isn't.

368,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force last month, which brings the number of Americans the U.S. Department of Labor counts as part of the labor force - those people if they are at least 16, are not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home, and whom either do have a job or have actively looked for one in the last four weeks - to an historic record of 88,921,000 Americans, with a net 119,000 fewer peopl employed in August than in July. If the lqabor force partivcipation had stayed the same instead of falling of precipitously, the cooked U-3 unemployment rate would have been 8.4 %.

Even worse, the Labor Department also revised the employment numbers for June and July admitting that 41,000 fewer jobs were created in than they previously reported.
This isn't as picture of even a mild recovery no matter what the spin dopctors at the White House tell you. It's a portrait of a stagnant economy going nowhere with the wheels starting to come off.

And President Obama wants to cripple it even further by assessing more taxes - ooops, sorry, 'new revenues' - implementing the tax increases inherent in ObamaCare and borrowing more money for green energy scams run by his donor cronies.

If America was a corporation, it would already be in receivership, and this president would have been fired a long time ago for gross misconduct and willful negligence, not to mention being sued in civil court for damages.

Where Does Barack Obama Rank Among US Presidents On Jobs And Unemployment?

Now, here's an interesting idea, courtesy of the whizkid at Political Math: using Bureaus Of Labor Statistics figures, where does President Obama rank among modern U.S. presidents on job creation and unemployment?

(hat tip, Ace's place)

I'll let the whiz kid describe his work and the various caveats:

Recently President Obama’s team has felt that attacking Romney’s jobs record in Massachusetts tests well in the sample group.

These attacks got me thinking about executive job records. “Where” I asked myself “would President Obama place in a ranking of US Presidents in terms of job creation?”

Is this a fair comparison? Yes and no. Part of the Goose/Gander series is that I create a provocative visual and then explain in more details what is fair and isn’t fair about it.

This Isn’t Fair

President Obama hasn’t had a full term yet

This puts him at a distinct disadvantage to everyone else (except John F Kennedy) because he hasn’t had the same amount of time to grow jobs. However it also seems pretty obvious that he’s not going to get out of last place before January 2013. That would require 300K new jobs per month every month from now until then.

President Obama came into office in the middle of a recession

In fact, he came in the middle of a recession that was worse in terms of job loss than anything any other president in this chart had to deal with. Now, he did split those job losses about half-and-half with George W Bush, so it’s not as bad as it could have been for him.

Presidents only have a certain amount of control over job growth

Actually presidents (and executives in general) only have a certain amount of control over the economy, so this entire exercise is kind of tainted by that fact. But this is the part where we point out that Obama did start this by attacking Mitt Romney’s job record in a similar way.

This Is Fair

The data Is Unassailable

I’m using the Employment table from the BLS A Tables. This is not the one that most Obama proponents prefer to use. They prefer using the BLS B Tables because they give numbers that are kinder to Obama. But the B Tables undercount employment (they only count payrolls) and everyone knows this.

I counted January-January (or whenever the president left office) for each president. I did this not because it was particularly fair but because I wanted to match how Obama has assigned himself and Romney jobs responsibility. I’m following his lead to show that, if we take him at his word, he doesn’t stand up to his own standard.

If we’re going to play the presidential job visuals game…

… this is a totally fair visual to keep in mind. Depending on the metric, Obama talks about jobs in different ways. When talking raw numbers, he likes to talk about the “last 22 months” or however gets us to the low point in the recession. When talking about month-to-month change, he likes to talk about when he came into office which was the worst point of job loss in the recession, so everything else looks good in comparison.

Fairly or unfairly, Presidents and jobs are commonly linked. It’s only fair to give a proper representation of that information.

In other words, when it comes to modern presidents, Barack Obama is dead last in job creation and Numero Uno in the unemployment rate under his watch.

I would also add that part of the George W. Bush numbers occurred during the period of January 2007 to January 2009, when the Democrats, including Senator Barack Obama controlled Congress and voted for the very policies President Obama constantly blames President George W. Bush for.

If the American people re-elect this incompetent and his crew, they will get exactly what they deserve.

July's Job Report - Dismal

While the Obama campaign continues to rant about Mitt Romney's tax returns, the main issue on most American's minds, the dismal economy, continues to become more of a concern as it worsens under President Obama's stewardship.

The 'unemployment rate' rose to 8.3 per cent. The scare quotes are there because that's the fake U-3 figure politicians pick when they want to put a positive spin on things, based on new unemployment insurance claims.

The U-6 figure is the more accurate one that includes people who've stopped looking for work, people not covered by unemployment ( like the self-employed who've shut their doors) people in the labor force seeking their first jobs and calculates underemployment. And it doesn't allow any creative figuring that's figured prominently in the Obama Administration, like artificially lowering the number of people in the labor force to make the percentage lower.

The current U-6 real unemployment rate? 15.0 percent, as of this July.

The Administration may be attempting to put a spin on this by touting 163,000 jobs added, but because 150,000 people simply dropped out of the labor force, there was actually a decline. In June, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 142,415,000 people employed in the United States. In July, that dropped to 142,220,000. That adds up to a real decline of 195,000 jobs.

These are the real numbers, and they aren't pretty.

I'll give the president more credit than he was willing to give America's small businessmen. He and his absurd and reckless policies definitely built this.

If this trend continues - and there's no realistic chance it won't barring something crazy happening - Mitt Romney's path to winning the election becomes a lot simpler.

Any reasonably competent and experienced manager ought to be able to cut spending and increase productivity by 10 per cent in both categories, and Mitt Romney has already demonstrated he has a winning track record in that area.

All he needs to do is keep reminding the American people of that fact and let them know that this 'new normal' the Obama Administration keeps touting (shades of Jimmy Carter's 'malaise' !) isn't something they need to tacitly accept.

If the August Jobs report,which comes out directly after the Democrat's convention in September isn't substantially better, President Obama is going to be branded with an impression of being lousy on the economy, something most Americans already believe anyway.

That's not a good thing for an incumbent seeking re-election to be branded with.

And all the blather about Bain and tax returns, all the beating of the racial and class warfare drums is likely not going to be able to turn that around, all things being equal.

Obama Administration Using Taxpayer Dollars To Outsource English Speaking Jobs Overseas.

There's a great deal of bombastic rhetoric coming from President Obama these days about 'standing up for the middle class'.

Most Americans understand that this president's policies have killed jobs, run up massive debt and skyrocketed the price of food and energy.

But it's now surfaced that not content with that, the Obama Administration has been spending our tax dollars in well funded efforts to directly aid outsourcing overseas and eliminate jobs here in America:

While the president has been urging “insourcing,” the government has been sending money to the Philippines to train foreign workers for jobs in English-speaking call centers.

According to New York Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop and North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones, this is unacceptable and “shocking.”

The pair are calling on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to immediately suspend what is known as the Job Enabling English Proficiency (JEEP) program.

According to Jones’ office, in 2010, after the two men compelled USAID to end a similar training program in Sri Lanka, the agency assured the congressmen that they would “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

In a letter to the USAID administrator, Rajiv Shah, Bishop and Jones expressed their displeasure at learning of the effort they thought the agency had explicitly promised against.

“I believe it was reasonable to conclude from that statement that your agency’s outsourcing training program was terminated, particularly in light of President Obama’s ‘insourcing’ initiative announced earlier this year,” the pair wrote. “Therefore, I was shocked to learn that USAID has used taxpayer dollars to invest in outsourcing training programs in the Philippines at the expense of American workers.”


There are over 4.5 million Americans who now have jobs in call centers here in America. I guess this president thinks of them as 'The Rich' who don't really deserve to be working anyway.

This needs to be publicized widely and made into a major issue by the GOP.

USAid is also the agency responsible for sending millions of tax dollars to the 'Palestinians' in Gaza and in the Arab-occupied areas of Judea and Samaria (AKA The West Bank. And this president deems that use of your tax dollars so important that he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually did something unheard of in Washington and overrode a congressional hold on $1.5 billion in jirzya for their 'Palestinian' friends.

So Now, It's 'Recovery Winter'!!

Remember 'recovery summer' and how that ultimately turned out? Well it's back,this time as 'recovery winter' . At least if you read the Soros media, outlets like the New York Times and other assorted Obamabot shills.

What they're jumping up and down about is a downtick in unemployment of a huge one tenth of a percent in December, from 8.6 to 8.5 and the 'robust' addition of 200,000 jobs.

I deconstructed this once before, but let's go over a few things again.

The percentages they're talking about are the the 'official' U-3 unemployment rate. It accounts only for the people who are receiving or have applied for unemployment benefits and are actively seeking work.

The more accurate stat is the U-6 rate, which government never trumpets but is a lot closer to reality. It includes the above plus people no longer actively seeking employment, people who are not covered by unemployment, like people hired as independent contractors or the owner of the small dry cleaning business or restaurant that closed its doors in your neighborhood last week or people let go with not enough quarters of employment to qualify for benefits or from part time and seasonal jobs. That rate fell too...from 15.6 to 15.4.

Adding 200,000 jobs during the holiday season is also not evidence of an uptick, since a number of seasonal jobs open up and then close afterwards in places like retail. Normally unemployment rates go down between 1 and 2%. A reduction of a tenth of a percent tells us things are actually getting worse. Retailers and others expected a skinny Christmas and gauged their hiring accordingly.

As Zero Hedge points out, there's also a distinct possibility that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is cooking the books by lowering the labor force participation rate to provide an artificially 'lower' unemployment rate.

The market isn't fooled either - the Dow is down almost 40%, although it may come back a bit if there are sell offs.

Look for a 'correction' in this horse manure next month.

The Real Numbers On Unemployment

There's this Drudge headline today...HO HO HO: UNEMPLOY RATE 8.6%. Only when you delve into the numbers do you realize that far from being anything to celebrate, it means things are getting worse.

Seasonally, this time of year normally sees an uptick in employment numbers because of temporary jobs, mostly in retail. That uptick is normally between 1 and 2%. An reduction in unemployment of a measly .3% is a sign that not only is the economy not getting better but that retailers expect meager holiday sales and have adjusted their seasonal hiring accordingly.

Another sign of the times is the emergence of a company that allows parents whose budgets are strained to rent toys for their children instead of buying them retail.

It's also worth repeating that the 8.6% is the 'official' U-3 unemployment rate. It accounts only for the people who are receiving or have applied for unemployment benefits and are actively seeking work.

The U-6 rate, which government never trumpets is a lot closer to reality. It includes people no longer actively seeking employment, people who are not covered by unemployment, like people hired as independent contractors or the owner of the small dry cleaning business or restaurant that closed its doors in your neighborhood last week or people let go with not enough quarters of employment to qualify for benefits or from part time and seasonal jobs. As of November, 2011, that rate was 15.6%.

In that context it's worth noting that new claims for unemployment rose last month to a seasonally adjusted 402,000, the first time it's been over 400,000 in months. And this, again is at a time when such claims normally decrease because of seasonal employment.

The president, his apparatchiks and their allies in the media will point to this 'drop' in unemployment as a sign that we have begun a recovery from recession and that President Obama's policies are working just fine. it isn't and they aren't.

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Obama Forced To Shelve Harsh EPA Cap n' Tax Dictats

President Obama hastily shelved his EPA's plans to implement harsh regulations to force companies to comply with new regulations designed to penalize businesses to supposedly force reductions in ozone and lessen global warming.

The announcement came just after the new government report on private sector employment showed that businesses essentially adding no new jobs last month, the unemployment rate stuck 9.1 percent and zero growth in the economy.Factor in the U3 figures, which includes people whose unemployment benefits have run out, people like small business owners who are looking for work and not collecting benefits and people who have stopped looking for work ( 'discouraged workers' in DC policy speak) that the feds never figure into the official unemployment rate and it's more like almost 15%.

And that's no coincidence.

The EPA's harsh new regs were based on California's, the most onerous in the entire country and perhaps the world. Businesses and the most productive citizens are fleeing the state in droves and the 'official' unemployment rate is 12%, 3 points above the national 'official' rate. The real rate is close to 18%.

Obama may continue to peddle the happy horse manure about green jobs to the True Believers, but he understood that what his EPA director Lisa Jackson was planning with his avid encouragement was a job killer that would have led to nationwide unemployment at California levels and higher prices on energy, food and most goods manufactured in America. Nor could he have blamed it on Congress, since it would have been entirely implemented through the EPA's regulatory apparatus and executive order.

The president listened to that little voice in his ear that keeps repeating 'elections coming up' and
punted.

Just as King Putt was willing to sell out his black constituency to pander for votes to those Hispanics who favor amnestia rather than concern himself about black unemployment, he cynically decided to toss his environmentalist extremist allies aside for now to avoid worsening the already dire economic situation right before people are getting ready to cast their ballots.

In the case of both black voters and environmental extremists, he figures he can take their votes for granted anyway, so the president has nothing to lose.

Of course, once he's safely in for a second term, watch out.

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