Saturday, September 08, 2012

There's No Spinning Dismal Job Numbers

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Upon the release of the August jobs report, people were looking a sign, any sign, that things were going in the right direction. Everyone was disappointed. 96,000 news jobs and 368,000 dropping out of the labor force is wretched by any measure.

Of course, the administration hailed it as a good sign but anyone not watching MSNBC or high on the DNC vibe still could see it for what it was, a continuing sign  that the stagnation and dreary economic situation isn't changing anytime soon.

As of today, there are more people out of the job market than at anytime since 1948. This is the worst run of +8% unemployment since the Depression and the numbers for young people are dramatically worse. We now have four years of college grads who are under-employed and starting off their work lives in a deep hole. Engineers are working grocery store clerks, lawyers are taking unpaid internships and older people are staying in the job market instead of vacating their positions and allowing the next generation to work it's way up. There are now more than 88-million people without jobs in what used to be the most prosperous economy on the planet.

Of course, the Fed will now use this as a reason to pump more and more money into an already saturated market and the value of the dollar will dive. Regardless of who wins the election, inflation will be a headwind for years. The vile mix of declining salaries and rising costs will hurt us in ways we can't yet comprehend.

But the real ugliness is yet to come. On January 1st, all of the Bush tax cuts will expire and sequestration--1.5-trillion in cuts to mainly the military--will kick in and the bottom that we feel we are currently at will drop out even further.

This is Obamanomics in all its glory. A Keynesian stimulus that stimulated no one but Obama's cronies and increased regulation and uncertainty on job-creators have given us the single-worst economy since my father was a kid. This is liberal ideology writ large. While the country faces economic uncertainty, the Democrats spend three days talking about abortion and booing God. While people are suffering, the supposed "party of the people" cheers for bailouts that have failed and a continuation of the policies that have put us here. They also ran the convention exactly how they run the country.

If there were ever any starker choice as to what direction we should go, I don't recall the time. Do we continue down the road to ruin or do we say enough and dig in our heels, fight back against a horribly biased media and elect a man who knows how to turn failure around? All one has to do is look at the chart below to see just how incredibly bad the last four years have been. The choice is easy if one looks at it honestly:




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