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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth

Counting those who have settled for part-time jobs or stopped looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994.

No change in the trend. $159 Billion paid out in "stimulus" which, according to one method of calculation, produced 640,329 jobs at a cost of $160,000 per job. Jared Berstein, chief economist and senior economic adviser to the Vice President Biden, argues the cost per job was actually $92,000. Using the VP's economist number it will cost $17,480,000,000 to only replace the 190,000 lost in October. Applying it to the total number of unemployed, 15.7 million, and current Administration policies would require $1,444,400,000,000; almost as much as the pending Health Care Bill.

Manufacturers eliminated a net total of 61,000 jobs, the most in four months. Construction shed 62,000 jobs, down slightly from the previous month.

One sign of how hard it still is to find a job: The number of Americans who have been out of work for six months or longer rose to 5.6 million, a record. They account for 35.6 percent of the unemployed population, matching a record set last month.

The labor situation is actually worse than what these figures and the 10.2% rate show. The government doesn't count as officially unemployed the so-called discouraged workers who have given up looking for jobs -- which in October numbered 808,000, up from 484,000 a year earlier.

And while the administration is promising good and in time reporting we can see that it's far from being the case: Agencies report having spent $207.3 billion and yet only $36,688,660,161 were reported by states.

Some 85 percent of the money went to four agencies: Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, Education and Social Security. For instance, some of the HHS funds went to some rural high school and college students from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee to conduct medical research this summer with a team of leading scientists at Vanderbilt University. The Department of Labor spent $11,058,877 in unemployment insurance (UI) modernization incentive funds to the state of West Virginia. And the Department of Education is mainly spending its money to keep union protected school teachers in their jobs. But the most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector, says de Rugy: For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs, with the difference going to other government jobs.Also, 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to federal agencies.

Those are the facts.

Here's are questions...

What's the incentive for any industry in the private sector, the only place jobs can be created that doesn't require additional taxation to fund, to create one new job?

What program implemented by this Administration and Congress can be pointed to as a source for future new jobs?

When in the history of any economic system in the world, has a position of more taxation, more regulation, and adversarial to business profits, stimulated any private sector job surge?

The only growth industry is government workers. Increasing the bureaucratic employment sector costs money and increases deficit spending requiring more taxes, counter productive to business expansion and job creation. Taxed at a higher rate - there is no incentive to make more money. There is an incentive to pay for the increased taxes by further reducing your biggest overhead - employees. Is there some other perspective which would point to a fault in that position which seems to be one of the major causes for this unemployment number?

How long and what results are required before the general population eliminates party specific politics and party affiliation as the first consideration for calling failure - failure?

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ORIGINAL: Brain
Reich exhibits perhaps too much confidence in Americans' ability to think and act in their own best interests. But he refuses to shift blame for corporations' dominance to the usual suspects, instead pointing a finger at consumers like you and me who want better deals, and from investors like us who want better returns

quote:

ORIGINAL: Brain

Robert Reich's Blog

The current rate of unemployment would have been even higher were it not for the federal stimulus package, but the stimulus should have been much larger. Especially with the states still cutting back on spending and raising taxes, the federal stimulus will be barely enough to keep unemployment from hitting 11 percent by the middle of 2010. Yet as the rate of unemployment continued to rise faster and higher than the White House anticipated, Obama could not return to Congress to seek a larger stimulus. He was spending political capital on health care.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/11/health-care-reform-is-critically.html

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ORIGINAL: OrionTheWolf

Also, if we calculate the true unemployment numbers, not how the government currently tracks it, what would the percentage be?

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Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail.

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

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Here's are questions...

What's the incentive for any industry in the private sector, the only place jobs can be created that doesn't require additional taxation to fund, to create one new job?

You've got a whole host of issues here, and you'd require a series of essays to address them all.

But I'll take the first one...

While it's a jobless recovery, and slow, we are in positive growth. Inventories, however, are very low, so it would take very little growth to force hiring, at least temporarily, to boost production.

Yeah, not what you're looking for, but one answer to the first question.

Inventories arent very low. There was a large drop in August due to cash for clunkers, but that was merely accelerated sales, and they will rebuild over the rest of the year

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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth

Which low inventory would produce jobs to the US if demand increased? Why will it occur?

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It's because you like to play dumb that I rarely enter discussions with you.
If you need help understanding that goods don't make themselves, I guess you'll just have to wonder. Demand, incidentally, doesn't need to increase necessarily. Goods are still sold, and inventories depleted. Empty warehouses are not good for sales.
You'll figure it out.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Musicmystery


http://www.census.gov/mtis/www/mtis_current.html

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Think about that for a minute. A former Administration Cabinet member states that the government knows better and decisions should be removed from the individual to the government. Saying it tells you how bad it is. Offering it as a solution instead of condemning it shows the effectiveness of the liberal agenda. It was this philosophy which elected this Administration in the first place. It is the cause of the problem not the solution. It shows how far the Democratic party has come in 50 years. Citizens are too dumb to know whats best - we need dictatorial proletariat controls by the ruling class. A ruling class of which two hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body - compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall. Where "for your own good" means according to this source, you better come up with $15,000 to buy your health care policy or go to jail.

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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth

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ORIGINAL: SpinnerofTales

~FR~

I seem to recall, back when this meltdown began, the leading economists projected that unemployment would top out at about 11%. It sounded reasonable to me then and it sounds reasonable to me now. Unfortunatly, the question we cannot answer is how bad or good things would have been without the stepe that were taken.

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ORIGINAL: Raiikun

quote:

ORIGINAL: SpinnerofTales

~FR~

I seem to recall, back when this meltdown began, the leading economists projected that unemployment would top out at about 11%. It sounded reasonable to me then and it sounds reasonable to me now. Unfortunatly, the question we cannot answer is how bad or good things would have been without the stepe that were taken.

Actually back in January, they predicted that if they didn't pass the recovery plan, unemployment would hit 9% by 2010...

http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

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ORIGINAL: Raiikun

quote:

ORIGINAL: SpinnerofTales

~FR~

I seem to recall, back when this meltdown began, the leading economists projected that unemployment would top out at about 11%. It sounded reasonable to me then and it sounds reasonable to me now. Unfortunatly, the question we cannot answer is how bad or good things would have been without the stepe that were taken.

Actually back in January, they predicted that if they didn't pass the recovery plan, unemployment would hit 9% by 2010...

http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

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It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error. There is the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package rather than the final legislation passed by the Congress. But, there is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity.

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If you need help understanding that goods don't make themselves, I guess you'll just have to wonder.

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Demand, incidentally, doesn't need to increase necessarily.

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery


http://www.census.gov/mtis/www/mtis_current.html

If the intent of that is to show that inventories are low, FAIL. Compare the inventory levels to the inventory levels of the last several Augusts....they are not particularly low when you consider the robust economies of 2006-2008! They are down about 14% over the last few years....and if you look at non-auto they are down far less than that...why? because auto inventories were impacted by cash for clunkers...a temporary fix and those inventories will not be rebuilt very quickly.

If the point was the graph, that is not inventories, thats the ratio of inventories of sales, and yes..its down...what a surprise during a recession, and during a time of inflated sales due to cash for clunkers. However the current level was still higher than anytime since 2003. FAIL AGAIN

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At some point, production will restart and require workers.