Conservative Musings

Our goal is to have intelligent discussion of the topics of the day. We realize everyone has their opinion and they should be allowed to express it in a discussion forum without calling each other names. We learn from discussion and not from name calling or argument.We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. See details

Showing posts with label bureau of labor statistics. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Bad News For Dems?

Black and Hispanic Unemployment Hits All-Time Record Lows

Black And Hispanic Unemployment Hits All-Time Record Lows

BY JOE SAUNDERS
MAY 4, 2018 AT 8:33AM

These are the kinds of headlines that have Democrats terrified.

At just a time when news about politics among black Americans is getting a new twist thanks to rapper/entrepreneur Kanye West and the discussions he’s sparking, the Labor Department just issued new numbers reflecting the strength of the economy under President Donald Trump.

And much as Democrats would like to deny it, the report is going to hurt them badly.

Friday’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — under the pro-business, anti-regulation Trump administration — showed an overall American unemployment rate dropping below 4 percent for the first time since 2000, CNN reported (through gritted teeth, no doubt).

That’s good news for the country, of course, but there’s even better news for a part of the population that tends to lag the rest.

According to the Washington Examiner, unemployment for blacks “hit the lowest on record in April.”

And that’s very bad news for a Democrat Party that’s trying to paint the Trump administration as a disaster for black Americans.

This is the party, remember, whose representatives sat on their hands during Trump’s State of the Union address in January when the president touted then-record lows for unemployment among blacks and Hispanics.

Do these numbers prove Trump's policies are working for all Americans?

But that stone-faced refusal to acknowledge good news could well be coming back to bite them.

With Friday’s numbers showing the black jobless rate lower than it was when Trump was speaking, black conservative commentators like Candace Owens will have even more ammunition to fight the black liberal power structure.

Freelancers like West — who has made a habit of upsetting the Democrat dogcart (and getting pilloriedfor it) — will have more room to speak.

And black Democrat politicians are finding themselves in the increasingly uncomfortable position of carrying water for a white liberal establishment made up of the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer while attacking an administration that is good for the actual constituents back home.

For Rep. Maxine Waters, the California Democrat obsessed with impeaching Trump, and Democrats — whose biggest brag during the Obama administration was how many Americans were on food stamps — are not looking real good.

And social media responses to Friday’s report showed it.

The Democrat spin is already starting — that the numbers were following a trend that started under Obama. Since they are some very smart people on the Democrat side (even if they’re wrong), it’s not stupid on its face. But even for the smartest Democrat out there, it’s tough to square good news coming from a guy you’re pretending is a modern Simon LeGree.

Besides, every American remembers the malaise of the Obama years, when manufacturing jobs “weren’t coming back,” and when the best Democrats were offering was some kind of spurious health insurance under a law that needed lies to get passed.

Truly great economic news, like record-setting unemployment in a population that has been left behind too often, isn’t something that can be shrugged off with political spin. And Democrats who have black constituents to answer to are going to be pushed to the wall explaining why black workers need to a better life for themselves to satisfy the whims of white liberals like Pelosi and Schumer.

Headlines like the ones coming out Friday aren’t going to make that easier at all.

What do you think?

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

The "Obama Jobs' Are Not As Good As The Administration Would Like You To Believe

The New Jobs Report Obama Doesn’t Want You to See

217 37 5 140 418

During his time in office, President Barack Obama has loved to crow about many things, but one of his boilerplate recitations is how many jobs have been created under his administration. It’s been very important to Obama to be able to say that he’s single-handedly rescued the country from the Great Recession caused by the 2008 subprime lending crisis.

His Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) spouted rosy job numbers recently that claimed that more people were working than ever before. “Since I signed Obamacare into law [in 2010], our businesses have added more than 15 million new jobs,” stated Obama at his final presidential press conference the other day, offering up a number that represented a gross amount, rather than a net figure. But according to a new study by Princeton and Harvard economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz, not all was as it seemed.

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Americans occupied by what the two professor’s term “alternative work” soared from 10.7 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015. The term “alternative work” is their appellation for work performed by “temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract company workers, independent contractors or freelancers” — what other commentators have referred to as the “gig economy.” In the gig economy, work is unsteady, comes without a fixed paycheck and provides virtually zero benefits.

In the economists’ study, the percentage of people working in each of the aforementioned categories — temporary help workers, on-call workers, independent contractors and contract company workers — grew substantially between 2005 and 2015; temporary help workers went from .9 percent to 1.6 percent of all American workers, on-call workers went from 1.7 percent to 2.6 percent of workers, independent contractors went from 6.9 percent to 8.4 percent of workers and contract company workers went from 1.4 percent to 3.1 percent of workers.

Professor Krueger, who actually served as the chairman of Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisors, noted that “94 percent of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category.”

Of that figure, he wrote, “60 percent was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” Stated another way, almost all of the approximately 10 million net jobs created in the period from 2005 to 2015 were nonstandard, non-9-to-5, untraditional roles.

“Workers seeking full-time, steady work have lost,” declared Krueger, while sarcastically admitting that “many of those who value flexibility and have a spouse with a steady job have probably gained.” For both types of workers, wage growth has been nonexistent because career advancement is usually not an option in these categories.

Corroborating this data were numbers released by the BLS that showed that in October and November of this year, the number of part-time workers grew at a far greater rate than full-time workers. In October, the number of U.S. full-time workers fell by 103,000 while the number of part-time workers grew by 90,000.

November saw an increase in full-time workers of 9,000 and an increase in part-time workers of 118,000. When discounting seasonal jobs, the November figures are worse; 628,000 full-time jobs were lost while 678,000 part-time (largely retail) jobs were created.

Other bad news included the number of people holding multiple jobs due to insufficient wages or other reasons. On a seasonally adjusted basis, this amount rose by 61,000 persons to a total of 7.8 million. On an unadjusted basis, the number was still a large increase of 57,000 to 8.1 million — the highest number in more than 100 years. If one goes back to the total number of jobs added for November, one is then forced to ponder how many of those jobs were actually held by the same person.

These figures may also explain people’s hourly average earnings slipping by .1 percent in November, the worst change in more than two years.

Among other discoveries cited by the economic study was the fact that young workers made up the largest growth component of contractors who don’t receive any type of benefits, even if they work full-time. This is often the case in the entertainment industry, where young freelancers are hired on a long-term basis without benefits being offered, an arrangement known as “permalance” employment.

All of this adds up to workers who are more leveraged, more disenfranchised, and less well taken care of than those who were employed prior to the post-2008 Great Recession. It also points out why, despite the lowest unemployment numbers in nearly a decade (4.6 percent nationally as of November), the growth in people’s real, disposable personal income has fallen since 2014 and remains mired at 2011 levels.

Also left out of the employment numbers is the figure for people who have opted out or are locked out of the workforce, which currently stands at an all-time high of more than 95 million.

For these reasons and many more, President-Elect Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day can’t come soon enough. Ideally, Trump, in conjunction with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, will be able to reverse these trends and start spitting out more honest numbers that reflect “real” job gains rather than illusory ones.

Regards,

Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority