Free Republic

President Obama claimed on Tuesday during his campaign rally with Hillary Clinton that the US economy is in great shape and that he created 14 million jobs. As usual, with Obama, know that the opposite is probably closer to the truth. First of all, the US economy is not in great shape. If it was the Fed would be raising interest rates. Because the economy is not in great shape the Fed has again decided to delay raising rates. Obama will probably not raise interest rates through the end of his term with some estimates that the US will be...

<p>Nearly half of U.S. workers consider themselves underemployed, according to a survey of more than 960,000 people by PayScale, an online provider of salary information.</p> <p>Three-quarters of those who label themselves as such say they're not working in a job that uses their education and training. One quarter say they are working part time but want full-time work.</p>

Millions of men in the prime of their lives are missing from the labor force. Could a big U.S. housing construction project bring them back? Something is rotten in the U.S. economy. Poor men without a college degree are disappearing from the labor force. The share of prime-age men (ages 25-54) who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the 1970s. The U.S.’s labor participation rate for this group of men is lower than every country in the OECD except for Israel (an outlier, because of the high number of non-working Orthodox Jewish men) and Italy (an...

Men have been disappearing from the workforce for decades. But a closer look at the data reveals that lower-income men account for much of the change -- and that reflects a big problem with the economy. Only 69% of these men, ages 25 to 54, are employed, according to new research from the Brookings Institution. That figure was 80% in 1980. Among middle class and upper-income men, 92% are working, down only slightly from 94% in 1980....

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Government data released on Wednesday shows the number of private-sector job openings was at an all-time high in April. Companies, however, hired the fewest number of people on a seasonally adjusted basis in nine months. Why the disparity? The JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data the government released show there were 5,289,000 private-sector job openings in April—114,000 more than in March. The government report also shows that private-sector hires declined by 169,000 compared to March. With private companies advertising so many job openings, why are they not filling them?

Nearly half of unemployed Americans have quit looking for work, and the numbers are even worse for the long-term jobless, according to a poll released Wednesday that paints a grim picture of the labor market. Some 59 percent of those who have been out of work for two years or more say they have stopped looking, the Harris Poll of unemployed Americans showed. Overall, 43 percent of the jobless said they have given up, according to the poll released in conjunction with Express Employment Professionals, a job placement service. "This is a tale of two economies," Express CEO Bob Funk...

The case for an Obama third term, a.k.a. a Hillary Clinton presidency, just suffered a major blow. Indeed, Friday’s jobs report (or lack-of-jobs report) is just the thing Clinton feared most when she launched her presidential bid: namely, that Obamanomics, which boils down to the bizarre notion that higher taxes, more regulation and class warfare actually work, would begin to fully implode while she was forced into defending it on the campaign trail — or risk losing the president’s endorsement. The sickeningly weak job creation during the month of May (just 38,000 jobs when economists expected closer to 150,000) doesn’t...

Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for May showed an anemic 38,000 new jobs were created during the month and a record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force, Obama Administration Press Secretary Josh Earnest insisted that "we are not disappointed with these numbers." "Those who can't grasp the President's goals for the transformation of this country harp on the point that 38,000 new jobs are far too few to accommodate this country's monthly 200,000 population increase," Earnest complained. "Likewise, they see the expansion of the contingent not in the workforce as a negative. They've got it exactly...

The Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Amendment Bill eliminates all white people including the disabled. “The definition of black people is now clear and aligned with the Constitution,” Tlhoaele said.... Read more on South Africa Today

President Barack Obama is giving up on some of the American manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico, telling an Indiana resident that many of those jobs are not coming back. During a town hall in Elkhart, Indiana, Obama was asked a question about manufacturing by a man who was once employed by Carrier Corporation in Indiana before the plant announced plans to move to Mexico. “What we have to do is to make sure that folks are trained for the jobs that are coming in now because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come...

A record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force in May -- 664,000 more than in April -- and the labor force participation rate dropped two-tenths of a point to 62.6 percent, near its 38-year low, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. When President Obama took office in January 2009, 80,529,000 Americans were not participating in the labor force; since then, 14,179,000 Americans have left the workforce -- some of them retiring and some just quitting because they can't find work. "By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here...

If anyone was "worried" about the Verizon strike taking away 35,000 jobs from the pro forma whisper number of 200,000 with consensus expecting 160,000 jobs, or worried about a rate hike by the Fed any time soon, you can sweep all worries away: moments ago the BLS reported that in May a paltry 38,000 jobs were added, a plunge from last month's downward revised 123K (was 160K). The number was the lowest since September 2010! There is no way to spin this number as anything but atrocious.

El Centro, California bills itself as one of Southern California’s “most promising new commercial and industrial regions.” But it had a 20.1 percent unemployment rate in April, by far the highest of the 387 U.S. metropolitan areas surveyed by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. That 20.1 percent unemployment rate is more than four times the national unemployment rate of 5.0 percent (seasonally adjusted). The only other metropolitan area to come close to El Centro’s jobless rate was Yuma, Arizona, where the unemployment rate was 18.7 in April. El Centro and Yuma, both near the Mexican border, are located...

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level since February 2015, more sobering news for the labor market after a disappointing April jobs report. The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for jobless aid rose by 20,000 to a seasonally adjusted 294,000. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, rose by 10,250 to 268,250, highest in nearly three months. […] “Today’s jobless claims report was a surprise, and not a positive one,” said Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors. “Jobless claims have moved sharply higher in recent weeks, reinforcing...

When the government jobs and economy report was released last Friday, it wasn’t quite as rosy as we’ve been led to believe: Economist Herbert Stein famously observed, "If something cannot continue, it will stop." Given other readings on the economy, the rapid growth in jobs that was reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 4Q2015 and 1Q2016 could not continue. So, in April, it stopped. [ed. in other words, we lied about jobs growth,again.] Telling lies with statistics is so easy even a politician can do itFriday's BLS "Employment Situation" report was terrible. FTE* employment fell by 296,000,...

Something isn't clicking in the US labor market. On Tuesday, the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — or JOLTS — report showed there were 5.757 million jobs available in the US in March, a near record. Additionally, the number of unemployed persons in the US per job open is down to pre-recession levels at about 1.5 workers per job. In 2010, for example, this number was closer to five unemployed workers per job opening. And while the abundance of jobs is often interpreted as a sign of strength in the labor market, there's a persistent and growing gap...

As President Obama's second term nears its end he has begun a media tour emphasizing what he claims are the positive aspects of his policies. The complicit media, of course, have long worked to inflate positive impressions of Obama’s legacy, and this latest set of interviews is no different. "In two recent interviews, with The New York Times Magazine on his economic legacy and with The Atlantic on his foreign policy legacy, Mr. Obama expressed a common sentiment: He had achieved big things and avoided even bigger mistakes, and yet most people just shrug," wrote Mark Landler for The New...

Should we be alarmed that the number of job cuts announced by large U.S. companies was 35 percent higher in April than it was in March? This is definitely a case where the trend is not our friend. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. firms announced 65,141 job cuts during April, which represented a massive 35 percent increase over the previous month. And so far this year overall, job cut announcements are running 24 percent higher than for the exact same period in 2015. Meanwhile, on Thursday we learned that initial claims for unemployment benefits shot up dramatically...

Ahead of Mother's Day, more and more millennials are gifting their mom the most precious thing of all: quality time with their offspring. An analysis from real estate and rental marketplace Zillow released Thursday found more people ages 24-34 in the United States are living at home with mom than at any time in the past decade. Twenty-one percent of the age bracket lives at home with their mother, Zillow found. In 2005 that figure was just 13 percent. Rents have continued to rise, but income growth for young people has not kept pace. Zillow found that over the past...