Tag Archives: U.S. Labor Department

economic news

How will POTUS react to the horrific job-loss news that’s coming?

You know by now the way Donald John “Stable Genius” Trump rolls.

He gets good news, he unlimbers his Twitter fingers to declare that only he could produce such joyous information; I can’t think of the last time he did it, but we all know that’s how he reacts.

What about the bad news? He still unlimbers the Twitter digits, but then declares that it’s someone else’s fault; Barack Obama is a favorite foil, given the intense envy he displays over Obama’s sophistication.

This brings me to the news that every economist in the country says is going to bring a huge gas around the world. The U.S. Labor Department will release the job figures for April. Projections tell us that in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, we’re going to experience a job loss of around 20 million. That number will dwarf the 710,000 non-farm jobs that disappeared in March as a result of the killer virus and the shutting down of the national economy.

I now am officially wondering how Trump is going to respond to that bit of hideous news.

This guy wants desperately to be re-elected this November. He had been touting the supposedly “historic” economic success he had enjoyed until the fecal matter hit the fan with the pandemic. What on Earth is he going to say when confronted with a jobless rate that is projected to exceed 15 percent.

I want to be clear. Donald Trump did not cause the pandemic. However, his clearly negligent initial (non)response to its severity has contributed mightily to the health and economic crises that have gripped the country by its throat.

He likely is going to find all manner of ways to blame others for his failure. My belief that he lacks what I call “presidential temperament” leads me to worry that he might go apoplectic.

When the March jobs report came out, we all knew it would get worse. I wasn’t aware at that time that it would plummet to the level we likely are about to witness.

We might need to get ready for a presidential implosion from Donald Trump.

business news, media news, national news, political news

Right-wrong track polls tell only part of story

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One of my social media friends thinks I spend too much time blogging about Donald J. Trump.

I heard him. So I think I’ll shift gears for a moment or two.

Those polls that measure whether Americans think we’re heading on the right or wrong track puzzle me. Take a look at the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls on that subject.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html

What these averages don’t necessarily say up front is whether Americans want the nation’s directly to veer sharply to the right or sharply to the left.

I generally pay little attention to these polls.

The RCP average says there’s a 30-plus percentage variance, meaning that about one-third more Americans think the country is heading on the “wrong track.”

No one has ever polled me on the subject. If one were to ask me, I’d say we’re doing just fine. I heard the U.S. Labor Department jobs report this morning and learned we added 161,000 non-farm jobs in October; the jobless rate declined to 4.9 percent; wages went up.

Is that a wrong track indicator regarding the economy?

I don’t think so.

Foreign policy issues? Well, we haven’t been hit by a major terror attack since 9/11. We keep killing terrorists around the world. Our alliances seem solid.

Federal budget policy? The deficit has been cut by one-third during the past eight years. Is it still too great? Yes. It’s heading in the “right direction.”

I’m digressing.

Right track-wrong track polls tell only part of the story.

business news, national news, political news

What happened to the calamity?

jobs

Just a shade less than a quarter-million jobs were added to the U.S. non-farm, non-government payrolls in February, according to the Labor Department’s latest monthly report.

The unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent.

The federal budget deficit continues to decline.

But by golly, we keep hearing along the presidential primary campaign trail that Barack Obama is presiding over an economic calamity. We’re heading for the crapper. Bernie Sanders keeps harping on the “1 percent” who are making all that money at the expense of the rest of us.

It’s time to give Barack Obama some credit.

Tim Egan writes in the New York Times:

“By any objective measurement, (Obama’s) presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelt’s time. Ronald Reagan certainly competes with Obama for that claim. But on the night of Reagan’s final State of the Union speech in 1988, when he boasted that ‘one of the best recoveries in decades’ should ‘send away the hand-wringers and doubting Thomases,’ the economic numbers were not as good as those on Obama’s watch.

“At no time in Reagan’s eight years was the unemployment rate lower than it is today, at 5 percent — and this after Obama was handed the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Reagan lauded a federal deficit at 3.4 percent of gross national product. By last fall, Obama had done better than that, posting a deficit of 2.5 percent of G.D.P.”

I’m not going to give the president all the credit for the economic recovery. However, I’m damn sure not going to condemn with the ferocity that we’ve been hearing — primarily from the Republican candidates for president — about all the gloom and doom.

On other side of the great divide, we hear Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders yammering about the richest Americans not paying enough taxes. He wants to enact fundamental economic change.

I can’t help but wonder: Why?

Yes, we’re in the midst of a contentious political campaign. Candidates are bound to say anything to get attention.

Which is precisely, as I see it, what they’re doing when they keep harping on the economic disaster that hasn’t arrived.

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Yes, stimulus did leave a ‘trace’

Charles Krauthammer’s latest rant against the Obama administration requires a brief response.

The good doctor, syndicated columnist and Fox News Channel contributor, has declared that President Obama’s stimulus left no “trace in the sand.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/02/17/krauthammer_on_stimulus_this_thing_as_predicted_has_not_left_a_trace_in_the_sand.html

I have to disagree with that one, Dr. Krauthammer.

He talks about a “jobless recovery” and says the president will leave no legacy when he departs on Jan. 20, 2017, unlike Ike who left us an interstate highway system or FDR, who built “a Hoover Dam.”

Well, let’s try this on for size.

The Obama team took the field with an economy in free fall. We were losing 700,000 jobs a month. Unemployment was rocketing toward 10 percent. Banks were failing. Automobile dealerships were closing. People were defaulting on mortgages they couldn’t afford. Wall Street was cratering, with billions of dollars in personal wealth flying out the window daily.

How did the new guys respond? They pumped money into the market. They enacted tough new lending requirements, placing some rules on lenders, telling them they couldn’t throw money at borrowers on request. They bailed out the auto industry, saving more than a million jobs.

How has the economy responded? Well, the nation’s debt has increased — and I am the first to acknowledge it must come down.

But …

Joblessness is now at 6.6 percent. Is it because everyone’s found work? No. I’ll concede many folks have quit looking for work. Those horrific monthly job losses have turned into modest gains each month. The nation’s budget deficit has been cut in half. The foreclosure rate on homes has slowed to trickle. The stock market has more than regained all the wealth it lost.

Are we in economic nirvana? Of course not. But to suggest, as Charles Krauthammer does routinely, that the economic stimulus and the policies that accompanied have had no positive impact is simply hold fast to the partisan denial that the other guys can do anything right.

Yes, we still have steep hills to climb before we get out of this mess. We’ve made progress — and that’s worth saluting.

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Politics shows nasty side once again

Once upon a time I thought of politics as a noble profession. I subscribed to the Robert F. Kennedy view that politics should be a force for positive change and reform of what we think is broken in our society.

I continue to believe politics has the potential for nobility.

Then we hear the carping that arose from the U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report for January.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/07/republicans-slam-president-over-jobs-report/?hpt=hp_bn3

Republicans were quick to pounce on the numbers, which weren’t as good as the White House had thought would come out. The nation added “only” 113,000 jobs in January, down from the expected 178,000. The jobless rate ticked down a bit, to 6.6 percent. It’s down from its high of 10 percent in 2009, but still too high to suit the loyal opposition.

“Today’s jobs report underscores that there remains a real crisis for the chronically unemployed in this country. It’s too hard for many to find good jobs, wages are stagnant, and it’s harder to get ahead,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

I guess the most annoying aspect of the reactions to these jobs numbers is that the “other side” is quiet when they’re good, as they were in November and December. The labor market added about 400,000 jobs at the end of 2013. Did we hear anything then from Cantor and his congressional Republican colleagues? Their silence was deafening.

Yes, I am acutely aware that Democrats do the same thing to Republican presidents. George W. Bush couldn’t buy a break from congressional Democrats whenever his administration welcomed good economic news.

The nobility of politics has been replaced by something far less high-minded. It’s become a game of who can get the better of the other guy. It goes on and on.

I’m going to talk today to U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, who’s running for his 10th term in the House. I intend to ask him what he’s going to do to restore some sense of comity in Congress and repair its relations with the White House.

Let’s hope he can offer a noble answer.

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Persistent Perry keeps talking about jobs

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is nothing if not persistent.

He’s just authorized another national political ad that touts the job creation that’s occurred in Texas on his interminable watch as governor.

According to the Texas Tribune: “In a new ad for Americans for Economic Freedom, an organization aimed at helping Rick Perry champion Texas’ economic model, the governor and possible presidential contender talks about national job creation strategies.”

Interesting, eh?

Job growth in Texas has been largely a private-sector phenomenon. Gov. Perry has helped champion a business climate that is conducive to employers wanting to come here. I applaud that.

It fascinates me that Republicans such as Perry are quick to take credit for job creation while dismissing job growth that occurs on Democrats’ watch. I shall single out the dismissive attitudes the GOP has assumed regarding job growth during the Obama administration. The Labor Department this week announced that 204,000 jobs were created in October and it revised upward by 60,000 the number of jobs created during the previous two months.

Those jobs also are result of mostly private-sector activity.

Texas’s relatively good health is well-known around the world. Gov. Perry has reason to be proud of the state’s economic growth. Does he deserve the credit for jobs being created outside of government?

He thinks he does.

I’m wondering now if he’s ever going to give credit to the guys in the other party for the successes they, too, have enjoyed.

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Jobs report was supposed to be dismal

I saw the word “dismal” when reading a projection Thursday of today’s jobs report issued by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Then came the report: 204,000 jobs added to the national payroll in October.

It was far greater than the “experts” had predicted. They said in advance of the report that the government shutdown would have dissuaded employers from hiring folks they normally would be hiring, given that the Christmas shopping season is nearly upon us.

The naysayers out there will focus most certainly on the one-tenth of a percent uptick in the unemployment rate. I share their concern. We cannot seem to reduce significantly the jobless rate while we’re continuing to add tens of thousands of jobs each month.

Politics being what it is, the jobless rate increase will be President Obama’s fault, while credit for the significant boost in the job creation will go to someone else.

I’m quite certain congressional Republicans will find someone in their ranks willing to step up and take the credit.

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Watch these jobs numbers carefully

The U.S. Labor Department is going to release some jobs numbers Tuesday, a bit later than planned.

Here’s my thinking on what we might see and what might be the reaction. The economy likely will not have added as many jobs as it has in recent months and the White House spin machine is going to kick into high gear to blame the slowdown on congressional Republicans.

The Labor Department was scheduled to send out those jobs numbers — along with the latest unemployment rate — on Oct. 4. It got delayed because part of the federal government had shut down three days earlier. That must have included those “non-essential” Labor Department analysts who crunch those numbers and release them to the public.

And why did the government shut down? It was largely because congressional Republicans kept insisting on a defunding of the Affordable Care Act. It didn’t happen. The government remained partially shuttered until just this past week, when the Senate leadership from both parties cobbled a plan together to reopen the government and lift the nation’s debt ceiling.

The impact of the shutdown, however, reportedly did have an adverse impact on the economy. Employers suspended their hiring; businesses stopped their buying, as did consumers; manufacturers slowed their output.

Some estimates put the net loss to the economy at something around $24 billion — although I haven’t yet heard anyone translate how the bean counters compute that dollar loss.

So, the latest jobs report might not be as rosy as recent reports. Republicans might try to blame it all on President Obama’s “failed economic policy,” even though the nation has added something like 8 million jobs — mostly in the private sector — during the past four years.

Democrats, meanwhile, will be able to play to citizens’ fresh memories about the government shutdown. It hurt the economy and the Labor Department numbers we get Tuesday might give Democrats more ammo to fire at their adversaries across the aisle.