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Posts Tagged ‘Unemployment’

What is an Emergency?

Congress is about to pass an additional $32 billion emergency spending package to pay for the war In Afghanistan. It will have overwhelming bipartisan support, with legislators eager to display their fealty to the troops in an election year.

At the same time, the Congress is struggling with a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year, championed by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller. This faces a Republican filibuster and the opposition of many blue Dog Democrats, who argue that it shouldn’t be considered emergency spending.

What kind of country are we?

In the worst economic recession in 70 years, competitive industrial nations must choose their priorities — what gets saved, what must be sacrificed. No sensible leadership would choose to make children — particularly the children of working and poor families — pay the cost of the downturn.

This surely is how great nations decline.

Like Rome and Britain before us, Washington now chooses to police the world, even as it cuts back the education of the nation’s most vulnerable children. We fight two wars on the other side of the world, spend more defending South Korea from North Korea than the South Koreans do, increase military spending already nearly as great as the rest of the world combined while saying we can’t afford vital investments at home.

P.S. Please don’t give me lectures on our debt and the need to “pay for it.”

Conservatives in both parties don’t demand we pay for the increased so-called “emergency” spending for Afghanistan. And they oppose many ways to “pay for it” that would be immensely popular with their voters, but not their donors: tax the big banks, slow speculation with a financial speculation tax, end the “carried interest” scam that has billionaire private equity managers paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Senate Passes Unemployment Benefit Extension

The Senate voted Tuesday to pass a $10 billion measure to extend benefits for unemployed workers and fund road projects after Sen. Jim Bunning agreed to end his filibuster.

The 78-19 vote on the 30-day extension known as H.R. 4691 came minutes after the Kentucky Republican made a final plea on the floor of the Senate for his colleagues not to borrow the money.

President Obama praised the effort after signing the bill late Tuesday.

“The bill passed tonight by the Senate will extend access to health care benefits for workers who have lost their jobs, help small businesses get loans so they can grow and hire, and extend unemployment insurance benefits for millions of Americans who are looking for work,” Obama said. “I’m grateful to the members of the Senate on both sides of the aisle who worked to end this roadblock to relief for America’s working families,” the statement said.

Unemployment Extensions to Millions Still Locked Up in Political Games

Jobless benefits suddenly ended for some laid-off workers, Medicare payments to doctors were delayed and 2,000 federal transportation workers were sent home Monday in a spending dispute tinged with election-year politics.

Adding its voice to the flap, the White House said it was trying to “shame” Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky for single-handedly blocking the $10 billion extension. Bunning said he opposed the extension because it would add to the budget deficit, already projected to hit a record $1.56 trillion this year.

Most laid-off workers receiving unemployment benefits won’t be affected — unless the impasse drags on — but those seeking payment extensions won’t be able to obtain them.

With the nation’s highest unemployment rate at 14.6 percent in December, Michigan’s jobless ranks far outstrip the nation, which has an average 9.7 percent jobless rate.

“We have the highest unemployment rate in the country, and middle-class families are struggling to put food on the table as workers continue searching for new jobs and train for new careers,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, said in a statement. “These workers and their families cannot afford to wait for help.”

Obama is no FDR, We’re no Mass Movement.

It’s open season on Obama whom so many hoped would lead us out of the neo-liberal wilderness. He once was a community organizer and ought to know how working people have suffered through a generation of tax breaks for the rich, Wall Street deregulation, and unfair competition.

When the economy crashed he was in the perfect position to limit the unjustified pay levels on Wall Street and bring a crashing halt to the runaway financialization of our economy. Instead we got a multi-trillion dollar bailout for Wall Street, no health care reform, no serious financial reforms whatsoever, record unemployment, and political gridlock that’s will be with us for years to come.

Is it his fault? Or ours?

Obama has made his share of blunders. However, his statement that we “don’t begrudge” the high salaries on Wall Street because that’s part of the “free-market system” is about the dumbest thing he’s ever said. He was referring to Jamie Dimon’s $17.4 million payday, and Lloyd Blankfein’s $9 million.

But surely the President knows that at this very moment Wall Street is still receiving $10.4 trillion (not billion) in subsidies from the taxpayer — and that’s after the TARP repayments. That’s some free-market.

Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase still has a $34.3 billion subsidy, and Blankfein at Goldman Sachs is sitting on $23.9 billion of government welfare. (Many thanks to Nomi Prins for her first rate sleuthing.. ) Dimon and Blankfein would love to re-write history so that they could be portrayed as swashbuckling entrepreneurial survivors, men who avoided the bad risks that felled so many others.

But without government welfare their institutions would have gone under. They are two very lucky (and well connected) welfare recipients — lucky not to be among the 28 million Americans that go without jobs or are forced into part-time work.

We can moan all we want about Obama’s shortcomings, the mistakes his Administration has made and his inability to take on Wall Street.  But we haven’t exactly applied a lot of heat. A million people on the mall demanding “Jobs Now” along with serious Wall Street reforms might help. A million people showing up repeatedly might actually get the job done.

The free market on Wall Street is dead and has been for a long time. It’s been replaced by a billionaire bailout society that will provide decades of chronic unemployment and on-going bailouts for the super-rich. It’s a damn shame Obama can’t deal with it. It’s a bigger shame that we won’t force him too.

That 1937 Feeling

Here’s what’s coming in economic news: The next employment report could show the economy adding jobs for the first time in two years. The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary — and the calls we’re already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder.

But if those calls are heeded, we’ll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened — and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.

This shouldn’t be happening. Both Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Christina Romer, who heads President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, are scholars of the Great Depression. Ms. Romer has warned explicitly against re-enacting the events of 1937. But those who remember the past sometimes repeat it anyway.

During the good years of the last decade, such as they were, growth was driven by a housing boom and a consumer spending surge. Neither is coming back. There can’t be a new housing boom while the nation is still strewn with vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom, and consumers — who are $11 trillion poorer than they were before the housing bust — are in no position to return to the buy-now-save-never habits of yore.

What’s left? A boom in business investment would be really helpful right now. But it’s hard to see where such a boom would come from: industry is awash in excess capacity, and commercial rents are plunging in the face of a huge oversupply of office space.

Will the Fed realize, before it’s too late, that the job of fighting the slump isn’t finished? Will Congress do the same? If they don’t, 2010 will be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief.

Cobra Subsidies are Expiring for the Unemployed

Millions of unemployed Americans face the prospect of a huge increase in health insurance costs, thanks to the looming expiration of a government subsidy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February, launched a temporary government program to subsidize the often crippling cost of buying health insurance through a former employer’s plan after a layoff.

However, the so-called COBRA subsidy was designed to last no more than nine months for each person who was unemployed. Hundreds of thousands who got this subsidy when it was first made available in March are slated to roll off the program today.

The insurance subsidy will also no longer be available for Americans who lose their jobs starting today.

If the subsidy is not extended, hundreds of thousands will lose the subsidy each month, forcing them to pay health insurance premiums that are three times higher than what they’re currently paying.

National Unemployment Rate Hits 10.2% – Highest Rate Since 1983

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – In another sign that workers are being left out of the budding economic recovery, the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 10.2% in October, topping the 10% mark for the first time in 26 years.

Nonfarm payrolls dropped by a seasonally adjusted 190,000 in October, bringing to total number of jobs lost in the recession to 7.3 million, the Labor Department reported Friday.

It was the 22nd straight monthly decline in payrolls.

Large losses were seen in manufacturing, construction and retail employment. Health care and temporary-help agencies added jobs. Read the full government report.

Unemployment rose by 558,000 to 15.7 million, the government said. Of those, 5.6 million had been out of work longer than six months, representing a record 35.6% of the unemployed.