That Rathole The Economy's In? It's Really Just A Loophole...

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Just Another Day At The Office

More Ted here.

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John "Bronzer" Boehner: Brother, Can You Spare The Time?

(...your brothers haven't heard from you in a while...)

John "Bronzer" Boehner displays empathy--GOP-style.

From The Hill:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) revealed on Wednesday that three of his brothers lost their jobs during the recession.
Boehner, who has 11 siblings, said he’s not sure whether the three brothers remain unemployed.
“I’ve got real empathy for those who are unemployed, as most of you know I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters. I know that three of my brothers lost their jobs, I’m not sure whether they’ve found jobs, yet, so I’ve got a lot of empathy for those caught in this economic downturn,” Boehner said.

"Real empathy," indeed.

More Bang Bang For Your Buck.

From the AP via HuffPo:

The Senate easily passed an almost $60 billion war funding bill Thursday, but anxiety over out-of-control budget deficits led House leaders to drop tens of billions of dollars in spending from a separate catchall bill anchored by an extension of jobless benefits.
Confronted with a rebellion by Democratic moderates, House leaders planned to dump overboard $24 billion in aid to states and allow generous health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers to expire. The changes were an effort to round up votes to extend unemployment benefits and renew more than 50 popular tax breaks that expired last year.
Help for doctors facing a big cut in Medicare reimbursements would also be dropped from the measure, aides and lobbyists said, and is unlikely to be resurrected by a vote on Friday.

So if you're unemployed and struggling, tough shit; borrow some bootstraps from someone and pull yourself up. But if you want to continue to feed a bloated defense budget, we'll wire you a big, fat check.

This is your country.

Jim Bunning Throws A High Hard One At The Unemployed.

From Politico:

Senate Democrats spent Thursday night hammering away at Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) for single-handedly holding up action in the upper chamber – but he blurted out a message to one of them on the Senate floor: “Tough s—t.”
In an unusual display in the normally sleepy chamber, Bunning – without the support of GOP leadership – has blocked efforts to quickly approve a series of extensions to measures that would otherwise expire Sunday, including unemployment insurance and the Cobra program that allows people who lose their health benefits to continue getting coverage.
And that has led to a furious exchange on the floor, with Democrats attacking the senator, who has refused to relent on his objection, in unusually harsh terms.

Bunning is in baseball's Hall of Fame because he was a legendary pitcher. He went on to become a legendary asshole.

What Those Two Guys Who Still Have Jobs Say To Each Other On Their Way To The Office.

A Glimmer Of Hope Amid Simmering Anger.

While roving bands of angry, misinformed Americans are spending August making spectacles of themselves by screaming like caged banshees about health care reform at town hall meetings across the country, there is a glimmer of hope today. Still, times are tough and it's not time to turn cartwheels of joy just yet.

From the New York Times:

The economy lost significantly fewer jobs in July than expected. Forecasters were predicting a loss of about 325,000 jobs in June. The actual loss was 247,000 — the smallest since August 2008.

The average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, which had been flat in June, rose 3 cents in July, to $18.56 an hour. That wage is up 2.5 percent over the past year, while inflation has been roughly zero. So the average person who’s still employed has actually received a raise in the last year.

The average private-sector workweek increased by one-tenth of an hour, to 33.1. It was the first increase since last summer.

And the government said that the economy had shed somewhat fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

The one thing that doesn’t deserve much excitement is what will probably garner many of the headlines: the drop in the unemployment rate. It happened only because more people stopped looking for work and were thus ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed. The share of adults with jobs actually fell: to 59.4 percent, from 59.5 percent.

So we shed fewer jobs than we have in almost a year and wages made a modest gain. At the same time, more people dropped out of the job market altogether and 14,000 people lose health care every day. Millions more are a pink slip away from losing their coverage and many are under-insured and may not even know it.

Meanwhile, the ignorance of those town hall jammers is on full display, as they howl in full-throated support of a broken status quo.

Reaganomic Utopia.

U.S. Economy Autopsy Results.

Can I interrupt your 24/7 Michael Jackson Media Frenzy and Autopsy Derby for some real (bad) news?

From the New York Times:

The pace of job losses quickened in June after slowing just a month earlier, casting a shadow over the Obama administration’s attempts to stanch months of declines in the labor market.

The American economy shed 467,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent from 9.4 percent, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. Job losses were widespread among the construction, manufacturing, and business and professional services sectors.

The losses were sharply higher than economists’ expectations of 365,000 lost jobs.

Economists said a decline of 322,000 jobs in May had raised expectations that the market was bottoming out as the economy struggled to right itself, but the numbers on Friday dashed some of those hopes.

The figures also raised questions about whether the Obama administration, which has already passed a $787 billion stimulus plan, needed to step in again to shore up the American worker.

“The stimulus has probably stabilized income, but it has not moved the economy forward,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corporation. “It’s a finger in the dike. But in terms of getting the economy going, there’s no evidence of that yet.”

But some economists noted that a decline of 467,000 jobs in a single month still represented an improvement from earlier this year, when 741,000 jobs vanished in January alone. And they said that the stimulus plan was only beginning to take effect.

“We have to wait to see where things go,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “If we didn’t have the stimulus, the economy would’ve contracted twice as fast in the second quarter and the job losses we’re suffering now would be very similar to the ones we were suffering at the beginning of the year,” Still, the latest figures, which were released a day early because of the Fourth of July holiday, highlight a somber new reality for workers, economists said.

As the recession enters its 20th month, wage growth is stagnating, working hours are dwindling and 14.7 million people are unemployed.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled program, One Week Later: The Thriller Is (Still) Gone.

Welcome To The Jungle.

From Bloomberg.com:

The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week and the total number receiving payments increased, indicating the labor market may take longer to stabilize.

Initial jobless claims rose by 15,000 to 627,000 in the week ended June 20, from a revised 612,000 the week before, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance gained by 29,000 in the prior week, to 6.74 million.

Recent economic data shows some areas of the economy, such as housing and manufacturing, are seeing a smaller pace of decline, and the Federal Reserve said yesterday after a two-day meeting in Washington that the economy’s slump is “slowing.” Even so, companies have been loath to hire new employees, in part because they are waiting for sustained gains in demand.

Today’s report is “just a reminder that the labor market is still in serious trouble and the unemployment rate will continue to increase into 2010,” said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania. While the trend in recent weeks shows a slower pace of claims, “hopes for a quick rebound in the labor market are overly optimistic.”

A separate government report today showed U.S. gross domestic product shrank at a 5.5 percent annual pace in the first quarter, less than the 5.7 percent pace previously estimated. The change was spurred by a smaller trade deficit, Commerce Department figures showed.

Help Wanted.

From the AP:

The pace of layoffs slowed in April when employers cut 539,000 jobs, the fewest in six months. But the unemployment rate climbed to 8.9 percent, the highest since late 1983, as many businesses remain wary of hiring given all the economic uncertainties.

The Labor Department tally released Friday wasn't nearly as deep as the 620,000 job cuts that economists were expecting, and was helped by a burst of federal government hiring of temporary workers to prepare for the 2010 Census. The rise in the unemployment rate from 8.5 percent in March matched economists' forecasts.

The new report underscored the toll the longest recession since World War II has taken on America's workers and companies. However, the slowdown in layoffs may bolster expectations that the worst of the downturn's hefty job losses are past.

"There are glimmers of hope. We are moving in the right direction in terms of layoffs. They are measurably less bad than what we've been through," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

On Wall Street, the employment news gave stocks a lift. The Dow Jones industrials gained more than 90 points in morning trading.

Still, companies will remain cautious in hiring, making it harder for laid-off workers to find new jobs.

If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 15.8 percent in April, the highest on records dating back to 1994. The total number of unemployed now stands at 13.7 million, up from 13.2 million in March.

California's current rate of unemployment is 11.2%.

Golden State Blues.

Youch.

Pee For Texas.

The governor of Texas believes in trickle-down economics; he just peed all over the Lone Star's unemployed. 

From the AP:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has rejected $555 million in federal stimulus money that would expand state unemployment benefits.

Perry, an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill, accepted most of the roughly $17 billion slated for Texas in the plan.

But the governor turned down the unemployment benefits on Thursday because he says they would require the state to increase the tax burden on Texas businesses to fund an expanded program.

Hopefully Texas voters will return the favor when his time is nigh in 2010. 

I refer to the GOP as "Confederates." CSU/Sacramento Associate Professor of History Joseph A. Palermo must be reading JackRabbit Café, because he does, too.