Posted on 08/29/2014 6:52:41 AM PDT by markomalley
During his entire first term and beyond, President Obama and his sycophantic defenders blamed “the bad economy” on George W. Bush, as if his policies alone were the cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But Bush has been out of office now for nearly six years, and for certain has had zero influence on the country’s economy during that period.
In short, then, Obama now owns the economy and has for quite some time. So kind of shape is it in?
Not good. According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), a report that provides hiring and separation details for each month, the U.S. has yet to recover from the bad, old days of the Bush economy. Edward Lazear, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, examined the latest data and he says while there is a lot of “job churning,” there is little actual job creation:
The government’s latest survey of job openings and labor turnover implies that while the U.S. labor market has improved significantly since the recession, it is far from having recovered.
The key determinant of labor market health is hiring, and hiring remains well below normal.
Writing in Investors Business Daily, Lazear said that JOLTS, which Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen reportedly follows closely, reports that monthly hires and separations recently detailed “reveal important but little-known facts about how the U.S. labor market operates.”
He says during a typical month, for example, if jobs were to increase by 100,000, it would mean that 5.1. million workers were hired and 5 million separated, resulting in the net gain of 100K. Now, during the worst month of the Great Recession – June 2009 – when net jobs decreased by 500,000, there were still 3.6 million hires.
“The labor market is dynamic; even through sluggish periods, there is tremendous churn,” he wrote, explaining:
Reductions in employment during recessions come about primarily because the hiring rate declines, not because layoffs pick up. It is easy to cut employment to recession levels simply by a freeze in hiring for a month or two. It is the number of hires that tells us how close we are to getting back to pre-recession levels.
The data released last week showed that hires reached 4.8 million in June, the highest since February 2008.
This is good news. During the recession and first three years of the recovery, hires averaged about 4.2 million per month.
However, before the Great Recession began, hiring had peaked around 5.5 million per month and averaged 5.1 million per month from 2000 through 2007.
Now that the labor force is larger – as the population has grown – even more hires are needed, and specifically he says, around 5.2 million in the average month. But we are only about halfway there at present in getting hiring back to normal levels.
Pam Villarreal, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, added that there is another aspect to the hiring and jobs reports that is also not good news for the U.S. labor market – while jobs are returning, they are largely in lower-paying sectors.
A recent report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found the same thing: Jobs gained during the economic recovery from the Great Recession pay an average 23 percent less than the jobs lost during the recession.
“The annual wage in sectors where jobs were lost during the downturn was $61,637, but new jobs gained through the second quarter of 2014 showed average wages of only $47,171. This wage gap represents $93 billion in lost wages,” said the report, which added: “Under a similar analysis conducted by the Conference of Mayors during the 2001-2002 recession, the wage gap was only 12 percent compared to the current 23 percent — meaning the wage gap has nearly doubled from one recession to the next.”
Some tried to explain the phenomenon away with liberal buzz words and catch phrases.
“While the economy is picking up steam, income inequality and wage gaps are an alarming trend that must be addressed,” said U.S. Conference of Mayors President Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. “This Task Force, led by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, will recommend both national and local policies that will help to give everyone opportunity. We cannot put our heads in the sand on these issues,” he said. “The nation’s mayors have an obligation to do what we can to address issues of inequality in this country while Washington languishes in dysfunction.”
But what about other factors that are taking a huge bite out of the economy – like federal regulations, which have piled up under Obama, and laws like Obamacare, which impose huge new costs on businesses?
“After years of rapid growth during the Obama administration, the cost of federal regulations is now bigger than the entire economies of all but nine countries in the world,” wrote John Merline at Investors Business Daily. “That’s according to the latest annual report on the regulatory state issued by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, titled ‘Ten Thousand Commandments.’”
Fewer jobs. Lower paying jobs. Not enough hiring. Too many regulations. That is the legacy of the Obama economy.
They left out HIGHER PRICES.
Fewer jobs are good for the environment — Less people driving to work means less emissions. EBT keeps them home and 99 weeks of unemployment keeps them fat, dumb, and happy.
And according to the polling Limbaugh read yesterday most of us are still blaming Bush.
We are SO SCROOOOOD.
In order for the recession to be officially over, two things have to occur:
First, the hard numbers have to add up. No cooking the books, the job numbers and GDP have to be real.
Second, there has to be a ‘feel’ that works its way through the country. Neighbors talking over the bushes about their new job, their cousin’s new job, or their new car, etc.
Team Obama has done everything they can to cook the books and spread “hope and change”, but neither the hard numbers or the ‘feel’ are there. You can distract people for a time with extended benefits (and blame) but it can’t last forever. I’m praying the American people will wake up.
Both parties are selling out America.
Bring back American jobs.
Jobs.
no joke
Obama wants everyone working for Minimum wage,his $15 minimum wage
Yes, they left out higher prices. I would like to see someone create an inflation adjustment table based on the necessities of life. In other words what would it cost to actually live in 2014 the way that the typical American lived in 1964, it would little resemble the current CPI charts. The official figures claim that $7.69 now is equal to what $1.00 was in 1964, I say that is ridiculous. Families in South Carolina were able to live reasonably well on $100. a week gross income in 1964. How many families can live reasonably well on $769. a week now? One dollar then would buy three or maybe even four gallons of regular gasoline untainted by alcohol. $7.69 will not buy two gallons of pure gasoline now. One dollar then would buy a fast food lunch for two or a sumptous all you can eat buffet lunch for one. $7.69 now will at best buy one fast food lunch. I could go on and on but my point is that the government is using the price of things like televisions and long distance phone service which have dropped like a rock to average in and come up with their figures to avoid raising social security payments. The reality of the modern day is that in 1964 a young man finishing high school could take a factory job and be a married homeowner with children at an age when young men now are lucky to be finishing college and those college graduates who can find a job at all are taking jobs at wages that the 1964 high school graduate would have laughed at if you apply a rational adjustment for inflation and in fact in many or most cases those wages adjusted for inflation would not have been legal in 1964. The 1.25 minimum wage of the era was worth far, far more than the current $7.25 minimum. Even the official figures put it at $9.61 now and that is laughably low. There have been recent studies reported saying that a current college degree is worth LESS in today’s job market than a high school diploma was worth in the sixties. I don’t need the study to know that, all I have to do is look around me.
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