Category Archives: jobs

Debt, Spending, and Taxes Revisited

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PowerLine has a couple of graphs that tell the story in President Obama’s own words.  Of course, he wants to raise corporate taxes in part to cover this shortfall, even though raising taxes, beyond a level long since surpassed, reduces tax revenue collected as businesses (and individuals, in response to parallel attempts to raise taxes on them) do what comes naturally for all of us: look for ways to hang onto what’s ours, rather than give it up to a ravenous government.

The graphs are clear in their own right; I’ll say no more here.

Remember this in November.

The President’s Jobs Performance

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Much has been made of the recent fall in the headline unemployment rate.  Among others, I’ve written about some of the data this publicly bandied-about number conceals.

Here’s another look at the employment picture, with a h/t to Power Line.  The figure was prepared by the Republican Study Committee, and it depicts the percentage of Americans actually in the labor force from January 2005 through January 2012. The RSC also points out that [emphasis theirs] 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.

Fairness

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Stephen Moore, of The Wall Street Journal, asks some questions….

about taxes

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country’s income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation….

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?

about labor

Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?

Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don’t work?

Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?

Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?

Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?

about individual responsibility

Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can’t afford to repay?

Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Contradictions

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In an energy policy article in The Daily Caller, Deneen Borelli raises some interesting disconnects between President Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.  She points out the failures engendered by his contradictions:

Despite his class-war rhetoric, Obama’s command-and-control energy policy drains our budget to reward crony capitalists such as General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and his fellow presidential jobs panel member and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr.

Ironically, the Obama war on fossil fuels hurts hard-working Americans because high energy prices have a disproportional impact on middle- and lower-income households and jeopardizes U.S. manufacturing.

And although Obama has called for fairness and a level playing field, the mandates and subsidies for renewable energy he favors would stifle competition by picking winners and losers.”

Then she gets specific.

on energy

Obama’s call for more oil and gas drilling in his State of the Union address was meant to deflect attention away from his failure to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

Obama’s energy policy excludes coal. Coal now provides approximately 45 percent of our electricity, but regulations generated by the Obama EPA are imposing significant costs on utilities, costs that are forcing some power plants to close and others to spend billions of dollars in order to comply. Those compliance costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.

Fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — provide roughly 85 percent of America’s energy needs. Yet, despite the failure of companies such as Solyndra, Obama is doubling down on renewable energy by calling for a national renewable energy mandate, forcing the Department of Defense to buy enough renewable energy to power a quarter of a million homes

on jobs

The president’s refusal to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, at a cost of an estimated 20,000 jobs….

Some Thoughts on the January Unemployment Number

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Last week some jobs data were published for January, and the headline number was an unemployment rate of 8.3%, a 0.2 per centage point drop over December’s 8.5% rate.  This seems highly encouraging, but it’s useful to look at some of the data underlying this number: those data give a clearer picture of the true employment picture for our economy.

If we look, for instance, the BLS’ participation rate—the per centage of Americans actually looking for work—some other aspects of our jobs numbers appear.  The Dec 2011 participation rate was 64% of a civilian labor force (those aged 16-65) of some 153,887,000.  Yet the participation rate of January’s civilian labor force of 154,395,000 had dropped to 63.7%—or 138,000 fewer Americans actually were working despite a larger labor force and 243,000 net jobs “created.”

Adding those missing 138 thousand Americans back into the numbers yields an unemployment rate of 9.1%%.  The participation rate in Jan 2011 was even higher: 64.2% (notice that: under the Obama policies, the participation rate keeps falling, as more and more Americans despair of getting jobs).  The civilian labor force that year ago January was 153,250,000 compared to Jan 2012’s 154,395,000.  Projecting 2011-2012 population growth rate onto 2011’s participating population gives an expected 2012 participating population of 155,539,000, or  1,144,000 more than the BLS says was participating in Jan 2012.  Adding those missing million Americans back into the unemployment equation of unemployed/(Civilian labor force) gives an unemployment rate of 9.0%.

Indeed, if the participation rate were at the level it was at the start of President Obama’s administration, as James Pethokoukis, of The Enterprise Blog, points out, the unemployment rate today would be 11.0%.  But under Obama’s policies, the jobs really aren’t there (the 243 thousand additional jobs appearing between December and January notwithstanding, coming as they do with 5 million fewer Americans actually working today than at the start of the Obama administration), and Americans, millions of whom have been out of work this entire administration, are giving up.  Moreover, a “measure of unemployment which includes both the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work” yields an unemployment rate that’s “a sky-high 15.1 percent.”

These are just some ways of looking at the true unemployment rate.  Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge, writes of yet another way.

Using BLS data, the US civilian non-institutional population was 242,269[,000] in January, an increase of 1.7 million month over month: apply the long-term average labor force participation rate of 65.8% to this number…and you get 159.4 million: that is what the real labor force should be.  The BLS reported one?  154.4 million: a tiny 5 million difference.  Then add these people…to the 12.758 million reported unemployed by the BLS and you get 17.776 million in real unemployed workers.  What does this mean?  That using just the BLS denominator in calculating the unemployed rate of 154.4 million, the real unemployment rate actually rose in January to 11.5%.

The Wall Street Journal put it this way:

After such a long trough, the economy’s natural recuperative powers are taking hold.

Washington has also stilled some of its damaging impulses, at least temporarily, thanks to the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House.