Jobs Report a Bummer

The unemployment rate edged up to 8.3% making the the 42nd straight month with the rate over 8%. There are only 3 more reports before the election and if I were a betting man I'd say Obama claims 15-million dropped "off the rolls" and the rate will be 5.2% on election day.

Anyway, this is horrific for those without jobs or under-employed. When the rate goes up, there's no hope and when there's no hope the mood in the country sinks contributing to the spiral that makes the economy tank.

Here's that now-familiar graph showing where Obama said we would be after spending $750-billion on a stimulus that only stimulated his cronies and green jobs hucksters (but I digress) and where we actually are in reality. Three quarters of a million greenbacks down the shitter with nothing to show for it except pain and misery:

Note we are 2.3% above where Obama said we'd be if we did nothing, which was the preferred method or cutting taxes and spending would have been nice as well. Also note the green, which is the rate we'd be at if people supposedly hadn't given up and quit looking for work.

This is devastating and the spin sounds hollow no matter what the media says. America is hurting and Obama doesn't even have a clue how to begin saving our economy.  However, if blaming your predecessor and meeting with your jobs council once in six months is now considered "laser focus", I stand corrected.

I'm going on the record and saying Mitt wins by 6%.

Are "Green Jobs" The Biggest Government Scam Ever?

As someone who has been in the environmental business for twenty years, I used to chuckle when Obama and other liberals used to talk about what was first referred to as "green tech" and eventually became "green jobs". There was no such thing or at least not enough out there to qualify as an actually sector of the job market.

Perhaps if Obama had resurrected the Superfund or offered a tax incentive for businesses to clean up the environmental messes they made, we'd have seen an actually green sector evolve but it sure as hell wasn't coming from solar cells and windmills. A true push for remediation of contaminated sites would have cost nothing out of pocket but returned a huge amount of jobs in remediation construction, demolition, engineering and new construction on the formerly contaminated sites.

Instead we get this:

 The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.

It took $9.8-million to create jobs that probably pay on average less than $50,000 per year. So where did the money go? To Obama cronies of course who lined pockets and ran away like Solyndra and the myriad other companies that Obama showered our tax dollars on.

Obama could have easily given a $9-billion tax cut and gotten a shit load more of a return.

New Hot Air writer Erika Johnsen notes that the Obama administration's definition of "green jobs" is very loose and still it couldn't come up with more than 910: