The Employment and Training Administration is a government agency that tracks the number of jobs added and lost in the economy. Let us take a quick look at what they have to say:
In the week ending September 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 428,000, an increase of 11,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 417,000 [revised up]. The 4-week moving average was 419,500, an increase of 4,000 from the previous week's revised average of 415,500 [revised up as well].
What this basically means is that despite what a politician might have you believe, there ain't shit for jobs out there and the number of people becoming jobless and officially counted as unemployed continues to rise. With the trend the way it looks, we likely will see negative job growth for the month of September. Negative job growth basically means that more jobs were destroyed than were created in a given time frame.
On top of this rosy information the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that:
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent in August on a seasonally adjusted basis. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.8 percent before seasonal adjustment.
The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.2 percent in August, the same increase as the previous month. Shelter and apparel were the biggest contributors, though the indexes for most of its major components posted increases, including used cars and trucks, medical care, household furnishings and operations, recreation, tobacco, and personal care. The new vehicles index, unchanged for the second month in a row, was an exception... The energy index has risen 18.4 percent over the last year, while the food index has increased 4.6 percent.
What all that mumbo jumbo translates to says that everything that you can't live without got more expensive very fast. Remember, 0.4% inflation in one month may not seem like much but you multiply that by 12 and you have 4.8% increase in cost of living over the course of one year. A year in which more people than ever have no job, no savings, and many continue to still lose assets like their houses. Then you take that 4.8% and you multiply by the roughly three plus shitty years we've had and you get almost 15% increase in every needed good to survive. That adds up quickly.
Republicans and Obama have said that tax cuts will spur job growth. They've said this since Obama took office. Obama so far has cut taxes more than George Bush has and yet the job growth continues to suck ass in a big way. Obama’s new jobs bill contains many many more tax cuts. If we didn't break through the barrier to the greener pastures for our economy by ramming our heads into the wall, why in the hell does Washington think that we just need to try one more time? We've already tried this since basically Reagan and every time since then we've had a downturn economy we double down on the tax cuts and it never works.
Businesses and consumers are not spending money in the economy enough to get the economy moving which leaves only the government left that has the power to spend money in the economy enough to jump start it. This is called stimulus spending. We sort of tried it once when Obama took office only half of his stimulus bill wasn't government spending, it was tax cuts that weren't used to generate a significant amount of economic activity.
We will have a shit economy until someone starts spending a lot of money. Consumers don't have any money left, businesses are sitting on never before seen record profits but refuse to spend it and thus the onus is on the government to spend. Yet the rhetoric would have you believe that for every one dollar the government spends a job loses its funding.
What bullshit.
--Kirs
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