The number of Americans who are 18 years or older and who have decided not to participate in the nation's labor force has pushed past 90,000,000 for the first time, according to data released today by the bureau of labor statistics.
The BLS counts a person as participating in the labor force it they are either 16 years or older and have a job or have actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks. A person is not participating in the labor force if they are 16 years or older and do not have a job and have not sought a job in the last 4 weeks.
READ MORE: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/90473000-record-number-not-labor-force-almost-10m-under-obama
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Fracking Boom Seen Raising Household Incomes by $1,200
Surging oil and natural gas production brought on by
hydraulic fracturing is lifting the U.S. economy by lowering energy
costs for consumers and manufacturers, according an industry-funded
report.
“What really surprised me was how powerful an impact it is having to such a broad base of the economy,” John Larson, vice president of economics and public sector consulting for IHS CERA and lead author of the report, said in an interview. “It makes it to me a story that all Americans really need to come to grips with and understand.”
READ MORE: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-09-04/fracking-boom-seen-raising-u-dot-s-dot-incomes-by-1-200-per-household
Monday, September 9, 2013
Teen employment hits record lows, suggesting lost generation
WASHINGTON — For
the fourth consecutive summer, teen employment has stayed anchored
around record lows, prompting experts to fear that a generation of youth
is likely to be economically stunted with lower earnings and
opportunities in years ahead.
The trend is all the more striking given that the overall unemployment rate has steadily dropped, to 7.4 percent in August. And employers in recent months have been collectively adding almost 200,000 new jobs a month. It led to hopes that this would be the summer when teen employment improved.
In 1999, slightly more than 52 percent of teens 16 to 19 worked a summer job. By this year, that number had plunged to about 32.25 percent over June and July. It means that slightly more than three in 10 teens actually worked a summer job, out of a universe of roughly 16.8 million U.S. teens.
READ MORE http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/29/200769/teen-employment-hits-record-lows.html#.Ui3PbX9LNax
The trend is all the more striking given that the overall unemployment rate has steadily dropped, to 7.4 percent in August. And employers in recent months have been collectively adding almost 200,000 new jobs a month. It led to hopes that this would be the summer when teen employment improved.
In 1999, slightly more than 52 percent of teens 16 to 19 worked a summer job. By this year, that number had plunged to about 32.25 percent over June and July. It means that slightly more than three in 10 teens actually worked a summer job, out of a universe of roughly 16.8 million U.S. teens.
READ MORE http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/29/200769/teen-employment-hits-record-lows.html#.Ui3PbX9LNax
Friday, September 6, 2013
Obama's Affordable Care Act Looking a Bit Unaffordable
Independent National Journal analysis finds premiums higher under Obamacare as employers weigh dropping coverage.
Republicans have long blamed President Obama's signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the "Unaffordable Care Act."
Turns out, they might be right.
For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they're currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers' monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.
READ MORE: http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/obama-s-affordable-care-act-looking-a-bit-unaffordable-20130829
Thursday, September 5, 2013
New Jersey Property Tax Problems
The mayor of one New Jersey town is actually moving out because he claims he can’t afford to pay the property taxes there.
Egg
Harbor Mayor Sonny McCullough bought his home in 1985 for about
$350,000 and according to him, now he is officially taxed out.
In
2012, Egg Harbor property taxes were increased by 60% making his home
now worth $1.1 million and that comes with close to a $35,000 tax bill.
Depending on which formula you use, New Jersey is either number one or number two in the country for pricey property taxes.
McCullough
said, “property tax is the unfairest tax in the world. It’s not based
on someone’s ability to earn money. It’s based on the property value.”
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
As Predicted, Ratepayers Ripped Off by Bloom Energy
It comes as no surprise the Bloom Energy Fuel Cell Project with
Delmarva Power is costing much more than predicted in the Public
Service Commission approval process. CRI participated in a marathon nine
hour hearing and showed how tariff documents over estimated the
benefits of the project at every level. We were the only group opposed
to the tariff. Had the PSC commissioners adopted our analysis the tariff
would have been rejected. This past Sunday, the Wilmington News Journal
highlighted the problems in a front page story and an editorial.
source: http://caesarrodney.org/index.cfm?ref=30200&ref2=407&utm_source=Dave-+As+CRI+Predicted%3B+Ratepayers+Ripped+Off+by+Bloom+Energy&utm_campaign=Bloom+Energy&utm_medium=email
Delmarva and Bloom admitted electric ratepayers would
be stuck paying above market prices for power. They said it would be
worth it because of claimed economic development benefit of jobs at a
new fuel cell factory, offsetting higher future electric prices for
conventional power, the avoided cost of buying renewable energy credits,
and environmental benefits. Two years down the road our predictions are
coming true:
· The cost will be at least three times expected and could go to a half billion dollars over the twenty year life of the project
· Overall
economic development potential will be one third expected and the
Delaware solar industry has been decimated by the offsets in Solar
Renewable Energy Credits
· Environmental
benefits would have been eight to ten times higher if a conventional
natural gas power plant had been built and electric rates would have
gone down instead of up
Delmarva Power submits monthly reports listing the
tariff payments, fuel cost, and operating cost of the fuel cell project
along with the offsetting revenue from the sale of the electricity. The
PSC, using company documents, estimated the comparable levelized above
market cost would be $3.30/month for a typical residential customer with
2013 being much lower. With only two thirds of the project complete in
October the estimated cost is now $3.83 and, based on the last 14 months
of data, we can extrapolate the cost when the project is complete will
total $4.50/month.
The $3.30/month cost was to be further offset by
$1.96/month through the avoided cost of buying renewable energy
credits. However, the price of the credits crashedand the offset will
only be $0.35/month. The net monthly cost will go from $1.34/month to
$4.15/month, three times higher, about what our worst case estimate
suggested. The total above market cost paid by ratepayers will go from
an estimated $142 million to at least $437 million and could go higher.
Mistakes in the economic development analysis also
overestimated economic development potential by a factor of three. If
Bloom actually hires 900 people, a big if, the jobs will cost half a
million dollars each in above market electric rates. Bloom is behind
schedule in hiring and the News Journal reported most of the license
plates on cars at the plant were out-of-state.
Environmental benefits were also exaggerated by
comparing air pollution savings only against coal fired generation. The
same $350 million investment made for fuel cells would have bought ten
times the generation capacity of a typical new conventional natural gas
generator leading to eight to ten times the air pollution savings. The
power cost would have been a third the cost of the fuel cell generation
and would actually have lowered electric rates.
The key question now is will future conventional
power price increases and higher renewable energy prices offset the
fuel cell tariff cost down the road. The US Energy Information Agency is
predicting fairly stable demand and slow growth in future electric
rates (one third the rate of increase used in tariff
documents). Renewable energy credit prices reflect the installed cost of
new wind and solar projects which have come down dramatically and are
expected to fall further. The prospect of either higher electric rates
or higher renewable energy credit prices going up enough to bail out
ratepayers from the high cost of fuel cell power is extremely low.
source: http://caesarrodney.org/index.cfm?ref=30200&ref2=407&utm_source=Dave-+As+CRI+Predicted%3B+Ratepayers+Ripped+Off+by+Bloom+Energy&utm_campaign=Bloom+Energy&utm_medium=email
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
The “New Economy” Is The No Jobs Economy
The “New Economy” Is The No Jobs Economy
Paul Craig Roberts
One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.
Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.
For example, in his report on the official GDP revisions released July 31, John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes that “academic theories, often with strong political biases, have been used to alter the GDP model over the years, resulting in “Pollyanna Creep,” where changes made to the series invariably have had the effect of upping near-term economic growth.” In other words, definitional changes produce economic growth whether or not the economy produces economic growth.
Inflation is made to disappear by substituting lower priced items for higher priced items and by defining price rises as quality improvements. Thus, the higher prices don’t count as inflation.
Unemployment disappears by defining discouraged workers who cannot find employment as people who are no longer in the work force. They simply are disappeared out of the ranks of the unemployed. It reminds me of Punjab’s magic blanket in the old cartoon strip, “Little Orphan Annie.” Punjab disposed of problem people by covering them with his blanket, or perhaps it was a rug, and they disappeared.
Despite the absurdity of the government’s data, Wall Street awaits with baited breath each new release to decide whether markets should go up or down or stay the same. In other words, the financial markets themselves take guidance from make believe numbers. In short, capitalism is rudderless. It has no reliable indicators. Everything is rigged to support the Matrix which keeps the population in a stupor.
Certainly the monthly payroll jobs number is misconstrued and has undeserved influence. If the economy is down, a jobs number significantly higher than the approximately 130,000 new jobs required to stay even with population growth is seen as a beacon of recovery. But the number is so distorted, as John Williams explains, by shifting and unstable seasonal adjustments and an average monthly add-on of 52,000 jobs from the “birth-death” model that no one really knows what the number is. Only a statistician like John Williams who is very familiar with the government’s data procedures can make much sense from the official statistics.
I take a simpler approach. I look at where the reported jobs are alleged to be. In the 21st century, the jobs created by “the world’s largest economy” have been lowly-paid, non-tradable, domestic service third world jobs. Manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs such as software engineering have been moved offshore to low-wage, low-salary locations. The savings in labor costs have enriched corporate executives, Wall Street, and shareholders.
I have made this point monthly for many years, and it has had no effect on economists, policymakers, money managers, or financial markets, all of which continue in their make-believe world of make-believe reality.
Here we go, one more time. Of the 161,000 reported private sector jobs gained in July, 157,000 or 97.5 percent, are in non-tradable domestic services. A non-tradable service is a job that produces services that cannot be exported, such as waitresses, bartenders, hospital orderlies, retail clerks, warehousemen. Thus, no matter how large the number might be, it cannot reduce the huge US trade deficit. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs without health or pension benefits. People in these jobs tend to live hand-to-mouth. These jobs do not produce sufficient income to drive a consumer economy.
Of these 157,000 reported jobs, 63,000 or 40 percent are reported to be in trade, transportation, and utilities. Of these 63,000 jobs, 60,500 of them or 96 percent are in wholesale and retail trade.
Before we go to the next category, ask yourself if you believe that in an economy that has had no recovery, in which there are no new manufacturing or construction jobs, in which the labor force participation rate is down, in which shopping center parking lots are far from full, stores with such a poor sales outlook would hire so many people in July?
Financial activities account for 15,000 of the reported new jobs. The Federal Reserve accounted for 80 percent of these jobs and bill collectors for the rest.
Professional and business services accounted for 36,000 of the new reported jobs. About half of these jobs were temporary help services and services to buildings and dwellings.
Health care and social assistance accounted for 8,300 jobs of which ambulatory health care services comprised 80 percent.
Waitresses and bartenders contributed 38,400 jobs. I have previously noted the anomaly of a population without good employment prospects or rising incomes going out to eat and to drink more and more often, so often that waitresses and bartenders comprise each and every month a significant percentage of the new employees.
In her commissioner’s statement accompanying the jobs report, Erica Groshen acknowledges that 8,200,000 or 6 percent of the currently employed are “involuntary part-time workers” who cannot find full-time employment.
The July 2013 payroll employment level of 136,038,000 stands 2,018,000 below the employment level in January 2008, which was 5 years and 7 months ago. If it requires 130,000 new jobs each month to keep employment equal with population growth, the US economy is behind by 10,728,000 jobs. These missing jobs show up in the declining labor force participation rate and the large number of discouraged workers who are no longer counted as unemployed.
Obviously, there is no economic recovery, despite the reporting of such by the presstitute financial press. Most likely the US economy is sinking further into a depression. The numerous indicators of economic collapse are ignored by economists and financial media busy at work weaving the Matrix to support The Lie.
As former executives of the “banks too big to fail” and their proteges run the US Treasury, the financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve, US economic policy has been focused on bailing out the excessively large banks created by mindless deregulation. The purpose of US economic policy is to save the large banks from their bad bets on poorly understood new financial instruments in the gambling casino created by deregulation.
The architects of financial deregulation, such as former Senator Phil Gramm and President Bill Clinton were rewarded for their service with fortunes of their own. The free market dupes, who aided and abetted Bill and Phil and misrepresented the repeal of financial stability as a new beginning for laissez faire capitalism, still pretend that the crisis resulted from Congress requiring banks to make mortgage loans to poor black people who could not pay.
The lack of reality in America is extreme. I do not believe anything like it has ever existed in the modern world. Essentially, no one in government or out understands anything.
The combination of the power of vested interests with ideological thinking remote from empirical reality is destroying the US economy and the economic prospects of the American people. The employment profile of the US economy is increasingly that of a third world country. Economic security, except for the rich, has disappeared. A large and growing percentage of the population experiences the insecurity of poverty or near-poverty, while the waiting lists for $50 million yachts expands. The distribution of income is so skewed upward that people of enormous wealth bid up the prices of used Ferraris from the 1950s and 1960s to $12,000,000 and $35,000,000. I can remember when a used Ferrari was something that a person with a moderate income could afford to purchase. I have a friend who bought and sold for $9,000 in the 1960s the Ferrari that last sold for $35 million.
Detroit, once the fourth largest American city and the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, is bankrupt. The populations of the cities that once were America’s thriving manufacturing base are declining. Cleveland has boarded up homes. St. Louis has 20 percent of its homes vacant. Welfare is under attack by the Republicans and even some Democrats as the plight of the population worsens and despair rises.
Washington only responds to the half dozen powerful, rich private interest groups that fund election campaigns. The American people have no one to represent them. The American people have been placed outside the system of “democratic capitalism” which is only for the one percent.
As Jeffrey St. Clair has made clear, America no longer has a left-wing. America is a right-wing world in which people, including “progressives” have been brainwashed into perceiving reality in racial contrast: the whites are well off and the blacks are poor and destitute.
This is the false reality of the Matrix. As whites are a larger percentage of the population than blacks, there are more poor whites than poor blacks. Moreover, the percentage of poor whites is growing. The way the jobs-offshoring, bail out the rich, US economy operates today makes every one poor, including the remnants of America’s once flourishing middle class. It is not a racial issue. It is a class issue. A few people have the power, and they are driving everyone else into the ground. The US government is their agent.
So go wave the flag, support the troops, believe the government’s and media’s lies, but unless you are the well-connected one percent, don’t expect any future for your children. You have been sold out by “your” government. Obama is making pretty speeches, but only the stupid will be fooled.
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