"With their cavalier attitude about the economy, the White House has turned the audacity of hope into the audacity of indifference." - Mitt RomneyAnd: GOP Weekly Address: ‘Where Are the Jobs?’
In the weekly GOP radio and Internet address, Washington state Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers says the economy is actually creating fewer jobs month-to-month despite talk of economic recovery.
You wonder how much longer the establishment media can keep covering for Obama. Facts like this aren't being widely reported: We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression
Read the whole thing. Related: Tammy Bruce - Obama's Ploy Is To Do Twitter Instead Of Getting You JobsThe Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression. In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.
The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America's greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.
Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly seven people in the labor pool compete for every job opening. ... We face the specter that long-term unemployment is becoming structural and not just cyclical, raising the risk that the jobless will lose their skills and become permanently unemployable.
Don't pay too much attention to the headline unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. It is scary enough, but it is a gloss on the reality. These numbers do not include the millions who have stopped looking for a job or who are working part time but would work full time if a position were available. And they count only those people who have actively applied for a job within the last four weeks.
Include those others and the real number is a nasty 16 percent. The 16 percent includes 8.5 million part-timers who want to work full time (which is double the historical norm) and those who have applied for a job within the last six months, including many of the long-term unemployed. And this 16 percent does not take into account the discouraged workers who have left the labor force. The fact is that the longer duration of six months is the more relevant testing period since the mean duration of unemployment is now 39.7 weeks, an increase from 37.1 weeks in February.
The inescapable bottom line is an unprecedented slack in the U.S. labor market. Labor's share of national income has fallen to the lowest level in modern history, down to 57.5 percent in the first quarter as compared to 59.8 percent when the so-called recovery began. This reflects not only the 7 million fewer workers but the fact that wages for part-time workers now average $19,000—less than half the median income.
Just to illustrate how insecure the labor movement is, there is nobody on strike in the United States today, according to David Rosenberg of wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff. ... The number of people who have applied for permanent disability benefits has soared. ...
Now for the really bad news: that 18,000 gain announced by the government yesterday isn't real.
For one thing, the number of jobs increased in June only because the Labor Department simultaneously revised downward the number of jobs that existed in this country during May. It's like moving the fences at Citi Field so the Mets players can hit more home runs. It might make Jose Reyes feel better, but it doesn't actually make him more powerful.
Without the fence-moving operation in the May employment report, the June number -- yesterday's number -- would have shown a decline of 26,000 jobs.
Then there's another problem with June's employment report. Included in the 18,000 headline number is a guesstimate that 131,000 jobs were created by newly formed -- and, therefore, invisible -- companies.
If you want to send your resume to one of these companies, don't bother. They probably don't exist, and neither do the jobs the government thinks they are creating. These figments of the imagination of the Labor Department's computers will probably disappear when the numbers are checked early next year.
Look even deeper in the June report and you'll see something else you really don't want to know. The more broadly defined U-6 unemployment rate, which includes people who are underemployed, went from 15.8 percent in May to 16.2 percent in June.
These are workers who want full-time jobs but can't find them. And the U-6 figure doesn't even include people who've given up looking for work because they believe it's hopeless.
Since this entire column is filled with bad news, I may as well give it all to you at once: The job numbers are only going to get worse in the months ahead.