unemployment

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at such an embarrassingly dimwitted and offensive statement.

Paul Krugman writes today in his NY Times blog that we appear to be heading into a Japan-like lost decade.

Whose side is god really on?

Reporters (this time the AP) continue to buy Republican bullshit on the issue of unemployment insurance.

Boehner has no idea of what his proposed cuts, to the extent the Republicans have posted just vague round numbers and not real programs. Here is a cynical exchange which puts some cold truth on the subject. OBTW, Polifact has said that the "200,000" Obama supposedly has hired is a simple lie--but what do you expect.

"So be it."

That was House Speaker John Boehner's cold answer when asked Tuesday about job losses that would come from his new Republican majority's plans to cut tens of billions of dollars in government spending this year.

"Do you have any sort of estimate on how many jobs will be lost through this?" Pacifica Radio's Leigh Ann Caldwell inquired at a news conference just before the House began its debate on the cuts.

Boehner stood firm in his polished tassel loafers. "Since President Obama has taken office the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it," he said.

Kuttner does it again.

Once again, the job numbers are dismal. In January, the U.S. economy created just 36,000 domestic jobs, far below the roughly 145,000 that economists had forecast. The unemployment rate fell, to 9 percent, but only because more and more discouraged workers are giving up and leaving the workforce.

The U.S. still has a jobs gap of about 14 million jobs, and that number is increasing as the labor force grows. Counting people who've given up, or who are working part time when they want full time jobs, the real unemployment number is around 17 percent. America now has about 25 million people either out of work or underemployed.

Meanwhile, corporate profits continue to set records. Profits in the third quarter of 2010 were 1.659 trillion, about 28 percent higher than a year before, and the highest year-to-year increase on record.

What's going on? Very simply, America's corporations no longer need America's workers.

I wonder how much of this is ideological in nature:

So it's especially frustrating to find out that in three-quarters of North Carolina's counties, it was too much trouble to lift a proverbial finger to help at least a few dozen people start drawing paychecks. There would have been a cost to county governments, heaven forbid.

Wake's manager, David Cooke, said it wasn't his call not to sign up, but he explained the reluctance: "In most cases it's false economics. Here's some more work for you [the county] to do if you accept 'free' money. We're all dealing with declining revenues or flat revenues." He said the county has passed on some stimulus programs because of associated expenses.

Big surprise. The Republican majority Wake County Commission don't need no help from Obama. The voters should toss them out on their ears for this.

As I pick up the pace of work again, coming into the midterms, I have to get some stories cleared off the desk in order to make room for some others, and that’s what we’re about today.

We’ll be talking about saving more than 300,000 of this country’s most important jobs, and paying for it in a way that is not only good policy, but is a real problem for Republicans who are yelling “no new taxes!” once again while pretending they care about actually paying for actual spending and actually want to cut actual unemployment.

We have a bit of work to do today, but we want to keep it somewhat short...so let’s get going.