Posted on 01/09/2009 5:42:54 AM PST by Red in Blue PA
U.S. employers slashed payrolls by 524,000 in December, driving the unemployment rate to its highest level in almost 16 years, a government report showed on Friday, suggesting that the year-long recession was deepening.
The Labor Department said the national unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent in December, the highest level since January 1993.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
The statistics here also fail to factor in underemployment.
Exactly. Libs think business people are stupid but small business people are among the smartest people in society.
No business person has any confidence in O.
Business are anticipating:
1. High taxes.
2. More regulations.
3. More lawsuits.
4. More govt corruption.
5. Horrible polocies that harm the economy.
6. Govt subsidizing loser companies that are failures.
the list goes on and on. Businesses are cutting back and have no confidence in O, Reid and Pelosi. Pelosi just passed a bill to make it easier for women to sue going back decades for back wages based on them being underpaid.
Plus, many will not admit that the minimum wage increase caused a lot of layoffs and job cuts.
“Translated, this means that we begin extracting oil from the shale deposits of Utah and Colorado, go for the extraction of petroleum WHERE IT EXISTS”
“Exactly how do you force oil companies to do that when they would lose money at current oil prices?”
You make an excellent point. The current answer is: “you don’t.” This past summer many on this forum decried the “oil price bubble” and were waiting for it to burst so we could go back to $2/gal. gasoline. My belief, and it remains to this day, is that a stable oil price around $70-$90 per barrel, which would roughly translate to ~$3.00/gallon, is actually good for America. Only if we use it as an opportunity to:
1. Extract oil from shale
2. Shift electric generation from coal to nuclear and
3. Shift coal production from electric generation to synthetic petroleum
All of that is feasible at those prices, and we stop bleeding money to our enemies and aren’t hostage to them any longer.
That's coming in handy to know which ones to support in 2010 and beyond. South Carolinians didn't get that message with Goober Graham, but the rest of the country may wise up.
Is there any conservative out there to speak out AGAINST this plan?
We'll see which conservatives are the most effective at stopping (or at least slowing down) the Obamanation, and those people can be our candidates for 2012. We're pretty much screwed in the meantime, Zero will get to do a lot of damage.
That's what I was thinking - the Depression unemployed got up to 25% but where's the beef? 75% were still working.
“7 percent unemployment means that 93 percent of all Americans are working, ok?”
No; it doesn’t. Those who have given up on searching for work and those who don’t work at all for other reasons are not counted among the unemployed. Stay-at-home moms, retirees, college graduates who decided that their degrees were worthless and stopped trying to find work, the disabled, among others.
Part-timers or those working several part-time jobs are not counted as unemployed.
I agree. The feds had to send and print 11 trillion to the insolvent banks and insurance companies who loss money when they used leveraging to buy residential mortgage notes. That is why the collapse came so rapidly. Now due to bad retail sales and store closings as retailers contract or go out of business. Plus hotels have high vacancy rates and office space vacancy rates are rising, commercial real estate mortgages is the other financial losses the recently restored banks will get hit with. Figure another 10 trillion must be pumped by the feds back into the banks to prevent them from reverting back to insolvancy as the real estate mortgage market will collapse or take heavy losses. As companies loss value and consumer lose jobs and start to default on credit card loans, car loans, college loans and etc. The commercial real estate crisis will be followed by the aftermarket debt crisis. Credit card obligations, non home loans, the leverage buy out obligations in the after market (where the loan is sold to investors) also face imminent collapse because Wall Street also used leveraging to invest in these notes. Feds and Wall Street experts have no idea how large this market for debt is. Estimates range from 55 trillion to 1 quadrillion. If this market or a sizeable portion of it implodes due to defaults or devaluation, the feds will not have anything left to bail out the banks and insurance companies and the US/world financial system will breakdown. These two financial time bombs can end the US in 2009.
U6 is at 13.5% (pre-Clinton adjustments).
If we measured unemployment the same as when Reagan came into office it’s already at 13.5%. Clinton removed “discouraged” workers from the labor force (people who want to work, have applied for work in the last year, but didn’t apply for a job in the last month).
“Historical” comparison of unemployment before 1994 requires you to use U6 which is at 13.5% unemployment rate.
There was no U6 in 1929—thats was a Clinton invention. In 1929, anyone who wanted a job but didn’t have one was unemployed.
Unemployment didn’t hit double digits in the great depression till 1931. If you use the same measure as back then we’re already well over that.
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