Tag Archives: political economy

Friday’s Jobs Report

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…which came on a Thursday last week…. Some tidbits from the BLS, behind the headline number, the unemployment rate of (now) 6.1%.

The number of unemployed persons decreased by 325,000 to 9.5 million.

That’s a couple million and four or five years late, but still: cool. Who is it, though, who’s newly employed now?

  • The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), while declining by 293,000 in June, is still 3.1 million
  • The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 275,000 in June to 7.5 million.
  • 2.0 million persons still are only marginally attached to the labor force, even though this is down by 554,000 from a year earlier. … These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
  • Among the marginally attached, there still were 676,000 discouraged workers in June; although this is a decrease of 351,000 from a year earlier. … Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.
  • The number of people employed full-time (according to the household survey that also counts self-employed) declined by 523,000, while the number of part-time workers increased by 799,000 [see the various tables available at the above link for these two aggregated data]

Hmm….

YGTBSM

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Wasting taxpayer money edition. This one is from Watchdog.org.

Take careful steps.

When possible, stay in your seat and, by all means, grab hold of that railing.

Simple advice, apparently from much simpler times.

Today, Hawaii seems compelled to pay someone—rather handsomely—to offer such ubiquitous and common-sense advice.

Of course, common sense and government oftentimes are mutually exclusive.

Hawaii taxpayers will spend $81,000 in 2015 on a new government position—fall prevention coordinator, who will teach Hawaii’s senior citizens, well, how not to fall.

Governor Neil Abercrombie (D) signed House Bill 2053 into law this week, which creates the new fall prevention and early detection coordinator position within the Department of Health’s Emergency Medical Services and Injury Prevention branch.

Because the good folks in Hawaii don’t have their own uses for that money, but Hawaii’s Big Brother does.

Contradictions of the Export-Import Bank

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The Export-Import Bank is a hoary, old financial institution with the purpose of facilitating American exports by providing financing or guaranteeing loans for cross-border transactions in which the private sector declines to participate.

There’s a hint there.

It may be that such government involvement might have done some good in the bad, old days before widespread free trade agreements. It may be, too, that tariffs were a good idea a long time ago. Or maybe not.

Free trade agreements signed since those days have facilitated lower prices, more freely moving “factors”—economist-speak for the goods that companies take in and process into goods that they then sell—and more freely moving labor.

Free trade agreements, in this way, have resulted in a broader range of goods for American consumers and American companies and have produced them at lower prices than heretofore.

The hint is this: if no one in the private sector wants a part of a deal, it’s likely to be a waste of taxpayer money for the Ex-Im Bank to get involved.

Some supporters of the function of an Ex-Im, if not of the bank itself, mention as William Galston did in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that

Ex-Im supported the exports of more than 3,400 small businesses that probably could not have obtained commercial financing, for reasons unrelated to the creditworthiness of the prospective borrowers or to the quality of their proposed transactions.

There is, however, nothing stopping those small businesses from forming their own private-enterprise association to support each other with such needed financing.

Galston cited other supporters who see the aircraft industry as an industry desperately needing the Ex-Im Bank [emphasis added].

[T]he manufacture and sale of commercial aircraft is far from a free market. Boeing’s major competitor—Airbus—receives massive export subsidies from a European consortium. In the best case, Europe and the US would negotiate the mutual elimination of subsidies. But until that happens, say Ex-Im’s supporters, it would be self-destructive for the US to stand down unilaterally.

These supporters, apparently, think this is another area where the US should lead from behind.

No, let the Ex-Im’s authorization expire, say I.

Wasted Money and the VA

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Only this time, it’s not the VA’s fault.

Veterans Administration hospitals have spent at least $420 million on solar panels and windmills while vets wait months—or even lay dying—to see a doctor.

In total, VA hospitals reported 23 deaths due to 76 instances of delayed care, an April 2014 VA fact sheet said. Then on June 5, Acting Veteran Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson revealed that at least 18 Phoenix patients died while waiting for treatment on a secret list kept off the books. It is not clear if that number is in addition to the 23 deaths reported earlier.

In truth, though, this failure, appalling as it is, isn’t the VA’s fault. This failure relates to the color of money: money appropriated for this purpose (physical plant improvements, for instance) cannot be redirected for that purpose (an HR move toward increasing numbers and availability of medical personnel, say) by the VA (in this case); such a redirection requires a change to the specific budget law that appropriated the two sets of funds.

The fault here lies in the misallocation of those $420 million—and that’s in the hands, ultimately, of Congress (both parties’ worth), even if “informed” by “environmentalists” and the VA management who assembled the original budget request.

The Obama Recovery

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Here are some graphs of how well President Barack Obama’s regulations and economic policies have been working since he exploded our national debt with his “Stimulus” package in 2009. The graphs come from Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business’ Maguire Energy Institute.

First, the sad classic graph of how the Obama Recovery compares with past recession recoveries. It speaks for itself.RecoveryComparison_Cox

This graph shows the total number of Americans still unemployed—the flip side of the number of Americans who actually have jobs.TotalUnemployed_Cox

Like the classic above, things are improving—hence “recovery”—but unemployment still is at historic highs when we consider the number of Americans that make up the unemployed 6.3%. This is because our population is growing faster than the number of jobs available.

This graph shows that the length of time Americans are unemployed isn’t improving very much at all. See the bit about jobs not being created fast enough, above, for a major contributor to this failure. This is a problem that tends to be self-perpetuating, too. The longer folks are out of a job, the more of their skills they lose; if they were in a high-skill, and/or information intensive job (engineering comes to mind), the more obsolete they become, too, as they aren’t as able to keep up with the new data in their field as are those still employed—or even the newly graduated.UnemploymentDuration_Cox

And one more:ProductivityGrowth_Cox

Productivity growth, output per hour by an employee, or what he produces in his hour of working, isn’t very much at all. Most of the jobs that are being created in this pseudo-recovery are service jobs. There are only so many tables a waitress can handle in an hour, only so many disgruntled customers a Customer Service Representative can handle in an hour, only so many investors a brokerage’s Investment Advisor can handle in an hour.

This…recovery…is, to use the Institute’s term, anemic. But we knew that from last week’s GDP growth number. And all of you still looking for work, or who’ve given up on that, have known this for some time.