The Real Story - The Economy

[Listening]

Well, it seems Hussein just needs to keep distracting people from it. But that won't fly for long. It is not looking very good.

For the U.S. Economy the News Is Bad and Worse - US News and World Report

t's time to adjust the gambit that people in all situations commonly use when reporting results to a supervisor: What do you want first, the good news or the bad? The formula that more aptly applies to the latest indicator of America's economic predicament is: What do you want first, the bad news or the even worse news?

The bad news is the disappointing June unemployment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worse news is that we are failing to train tomorrow's labor force for employment in a world of accelerating competition.

Jobs, first. The headline unemployment number remains at 8.2 percent, although President Barack Obama cited the 84,000 new private sector jobs last month as "a step in the right direction." He had the grace to add: "But we can't be satisfied." He can say that again. That 8.2 percent only measures people who have actively applied for a job in the last four weeks by going to an interview or filling out an application. It is not a relevant measure. People who have been unemployed for many months don't go through the business of applying for a job every four weeks.

******************************

As much as Francblo wants to whine about obstructionists GOP ers.....it seems that somehow some states are recovering and some states are doing well. What happened. How did they figure it out ?

 

[Listening]

From The Article:

Jobs, first. The headline unemployment number remains at 8.2 percent, although President Barack Obama cited the 84,000 new private sector jobs last month as "a step in the right direction." He had the grace to add: "But we can't be satisfied." He can say that again. That 8.2 percent only measures people who have actively applied for a job in the last four weeks by going to an interview or filling out an application. It is not a relevant measure. People who have been unemployed for many months don't go through the business of applying for a job every four weeks.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]

Given that the median period of unemployment is now in the range of five months, vast numbers who want to work are just not counted. If we include, as we should, people who have applied for a job in the last 12 months, and those employed part time who want full-time work, the real unemployment number is closer to 15 percent. And we've made virtually no progress in reducing this number. We need 150,000 jobs every month just to take into account the people entering the labor force. Today we are looking at monthly job creation estimates of only 75,000 over the last three months.

A more revealing clue to where we are lies in the term "structural unemployment," which indicates where jobs have vanished because of basic changes in how the economy works. In this area, people have little or no prospect of returning to the jobs they once had.

This is a fundamental fact similar to what happened to farm workers over several decades with the advent of threshing machines and other devices, easy credit, land consolidation, and the like. Those workers found jobs in the new factories, but today manufacturing is the great source of our structural unemployment. We've lost some 6 million manufacturing jobs in the last decade or so. Automation has replaced many of them, but today, so different from earlier decades, there is another big jobs thief: globalization. Work is shipped abroad because of competition in skills, speed, and pay in all those places called Somewhere Else.

 

[BlindBoo]

"The most critical step that we must take is strengthening the public school curriculum. The central issue here: increasing the number of qualified math and science teachers."

There are three courses of action:

1. We must develop a national program to recognize and reward strong instructors in the STEM fields and create more STEM-focused high schools and community colleges. (U.S.News & World Report has been pleased to focus on the issue by partnering with more than 50 other organizations in two conferences this summer and last fall.)

2. We must also be willing to open ourselves up to an immigration policy that permits, indeed encourages, teachers with the brains, talent, and special skills to enhance American education in the world of STEM. Those who would close doors here have closed minds. Imaginative teachers will enhance American innovation and competitiveness. It is literally a national disgrace that we restrict the number of foreign teachers who can come in and help us out. Nothing short of a major national effort to prepare tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of new teachers in STEM fields must be on our agenda.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Are Teachers Overpaid?]

3. We must devise some kind of state-by-state scorecard to assess the quality of STEM education and measure the effectiveness of STEM programs on a nationwide basis. U.S. News ranks the country's best high schools for STEM, and we plan to expand the list in the coming year. But we need more such tools. We have the best colleges and universities in the world, a lead we must maintain, but this is not a question of just producing more Ph.D.'s. We need the technical skills that lead to original creativity, which means supporting community colleges that excel in the critical areas of science and technology.


Posted from your link. Frankly I don't see either party being able to accomplish any of those goals given the current polarized political climate.

Interesting article.

 

[Sinjorri]

"The most critical step that we must take is strengthening the public school curriculum. The central issue here: increasing the number of qualified math and science teachers."

There are three courses of action:

1. We must develop a national program to recognize and reward strong instructors in the STEM fields and create more STEM-focused high schools and community colleges. (U.S.News & World Report has been pleased to focus on the issue by partnering with more than 50 other organizations in two conferences this summer and last fall.)

2. We must also be willing to open ourselves up to an immigration policy that permits, indeed encourages, teachers with the brains, talent, and special skills to enhance American education in the world of STEM. Those who would close doors here have closed minds. Imaginative teachers will enhance American innovation and competitiveness. It is literally a national disgrace that we restrict the number of foreign teachers who can come in and help us out. Nothing short of a major national effort to prepare tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of new teachers in STEM fields must be on our agenda.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Are Teachers Overpaid?]

3. We must devise some kind of state-by-state scorecard to assess the quality of STEM education and measure the effectiveness of STEM programs on a nationwide basis. U.S. News ranks the country's best high schools for STEM, and we plan to expand the list in the coming year. But we need more such tools. We have the best colleges and universities in the world, a lead we must maintain, but this is not a question of just producing more Ph.D.'s. We need the technical skills that lead to original creativity, which means supporting community colleges that excel in the critical areas of science and technology.


Posted from your link. Frankly I don't see either party being able to accomplish any of those goals given the current polarized political climate.

Interesting article.

i can agree with u BB

 

[Jackson]

Of course the real issue this election is the economy and we can't let Obama off the hook with his distractions. With record high deficits and nothing to show for it except record high entitlements, no wonder the people are saying we are heading in the wrong direction.

He's out of touch when he says, "The Private Sector is doing fine" or if you are a small business, "You didn't get there by yourself." The government was there. Well, the fovernment was there for everybody else, too Mr. President so why did these people make the business a success and not the others?

Could it be they had a dream and acted upon it? They had the fortitude to forge ahead? They worked day and night to make that dream come true? They put everything on the line to make it happen? That's not the government. That's the individual. Like Thomas Edison, steve Jobs, and my inaws. God Bless them all.

And Mr. President what have YOU done for this economy? Your jobs council doesn't meet. Even your cabinet meets on rare occurrences. You hand out entitlements when we are deep in debt, you give out amnesties when we can least afford it without the consent of Congress, and you unilaterally decide that no one has to work for welfare any longer without direction from Congress which was expressly against the law. How does it feel to be King of the Country that you are bringing to it's knees?

 

[pinqy]

From The Article:
... That 8.2 percent only measures people who have actively applied for a job in the last four weeks by going to an interview or filling out an application.

Not quite. People on temporary layoff expecting recall do not have to have looked and everyone else is unemployed if they have actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks.

Examples include going to an employer directly or to a public or private employment agency, seeking assistance from friends or relatives, placing or answering ads, or using some other active method. Examples of the “other” category include being on a union or professional register, obtaining assistance from a community organization, or waiting at a designated labor pickup point.
Employment and Earnings

So it's not just going to an interview or submitting an application.

People who have been unemployed for many months don't go through the business of applying for a job every four weeks.

41.9% of the Unemployed in June had looked for work for more than 27 weeks (Table A-12)
Median duration of Unemployment before leaving the Labor Force is 21.4 weeks and 24.3% of those who left without finding a job had looked for over a year.(Job search of the unemployed by duration of unemployment)

Given that the median period of unemployment is now in the range of five months, vast numbers who want to work are just not counted.

How does he get that? He's about right on the median, but clearly those people are being counted, or we couldn't have the median.

If we include, as we should, people who have applied for a job in the last 12 months, and those employed part time who want full-time work, the real unemployment number is closer to 15 percent.

First, calling someone who has a job unemployed is ridiculous. But as for the others....well, let's look at WHY people quit looking. I'll be generous and assume he doesn't mean to include people no longer able to accept a job if offered, or people who no longer want a job, so he probably means the Marginally Attached: Wants a job, could have taken a job the previous week, actively looked for work in the previous year but not the previous 4 weeks. As of June, there were 2,483,000 Marginally Attached (hardly "vast" numbers). 33% stopped looking because they "gave up" and didn't think they'd find work. So most stopped looking for other reasons: 8.1% for family responsibilities, 13.7% went to school or training full time, 7.5% were sick or injured and couldn't look, and 37.7% stopped looking due to transportation issues, child care issues, etc Table A-38

So why should we include people who stopped looking because they could not or would not work as Unemployed until they actually start looking again? And since we're after an objective measure, Discouragement is not very objective...it's very subjective and thus the margin of error is very large: June 2012 was 821,000 +/- 98,594 (12%) at 95% confidence (compared to +/- 2.9% for Unemployed and +/- 0.4% for Employed)

And we've made virtually no progress in reducing this number. We need 150,000 jobs every month just to take into account the people entering the labor force. Today we are looking at monthly job creation estimates of only 75,000 over the last three months.

"Jobs" and "Employment" are different measures from different surveys. "Jobs" is not part of the UE rate calculation, Total Employment is. And both Employment and Unemployment can go up at the same time (as they did in June: Employment increased by 128,000 and Unemployment increased by 29,000)

 

[kaz]

"The most critical step that we must take is strengthening the public school curriculum. The central issue here: increasing the number of qualified math and science teachers."

There are three courses of action:

1. We must develop a national program to recognize and reward strong instructors in the STEM fields and create more STEM-focused high schools and community colleges. (U.S.News & World Report has been pleased to focus on the issue by partnering with more than 50 other organizations in two conferences this summer and last fall.)

2. We must also be willing to open ourselves up to an immigration policy that permits, indeed encourages, teachers with the brains, talent, and special skills to enhance American education in the world of STEM. Those who would close doors here have closed minds. Imaginative teachers will enhance American innovation and competitiveness. It is literally a national disgrace that we restrict the number of foreign teachers who can come in and help us out. Nothing short of a major national effort to prepare tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of new teachers in STEM fields must be on our agenda.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Are Teachers Overpaid?]

3. We must devise some kind of state-by-state scorecard to assess the quality of STEM education and measure the effectiveness of STEM programs on a nationwide basis. U.S. News ranks the country's best high schools for STEM, and we plan to expand the list in the coming year. But we need more such tools. We have the best colleges and universities in the world, a lead we must maintain, but this is not a question of just producing more Ph.D.'s. We need the technical skills that lead to original creativity, which means supporting community colleges that excel in the critical areas of science and technology.


Posted from your link. Frankly I don't see either party being able to accomplish any of those goals given the current polarized political climate.

Interesting article.

What about the obvious? Allow schools to pay a math/science teacher who could earn more in the private sector then they make teaching than an English teacher who would be flipping burgers in the private sector?

 

[Moonglow]

Well, it seems Hussein just needs to keep distracting people from it. But that won't fly for long. It is not looking very good.

For the U.S. Economy the News Is Bad and Worse - US News and World Report

t's time to adjust the gambit that people in all situations commonly use when reporting results to a supervisor: What do you want first, the good news or the bad? The formula that more aptly applies to the latest indicator of America's economic predicament is: What do you want first, the bad news or the even worse news?

The bad news is the disappointing June unemployment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worse news is that we are failing to train tomorrow's labor force for employment in a world of accelerating competition.

Jobs, first. The headline unemployment number remains at 8.2 percent, although President Barack Obama cited the 84,000 new private sector jobs last month as "a step in the right direction." He had the grace to add: "But we can't be satisfied." He can say that again. That 8.2 percent only measures people who have actively applied for a job in the last four weeks by going to an interview or filling out an application. It is not a relevant measure. People who have been unemployed for many months don't go through the business of applying for a job every four weeks.

******************************

As much as Francblo wants to whine about obstructionists GOP ers.....it seems that somehow some states are recovering and some states are doing well. What happened. How did they figure it out ?

I did apply at least once a day when unemployed.

 

[Listening]

A bump for the thing that is going to destroy Obama and the dems in the upcoming election....

A really crappy economy and no clue as to what to do about it.