I asked if President Obama was actually trying to take credit for the 9.8% unemployment rate in September; wonder if he’ll claim the credit for this bit of news: October unemployment rate rises to 10.2%..
Construction employment decreased by 62,000 in October. Monthly job losses have averaged 67,000 during the most recent 6 months, compared with an average decline of 117,000 during the prior 6 months. October job losses were concentrated in nonresidential specialty trade contractors (-30,000) and in heavy construction (-14,000). Since December 2007, employment in construction has fallen by 1.6 million.
Thing is, a good part of the stimulus plan was supposed to be in construction, with heavy construction/road construction in the forefront, yet that’s where the construction jobs were lost.
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Update: Saturday, 7 November 2009 We’re so good at CSPT that we can bring you a story from tomorrow!
Why won’t Obama give you a job?
The White House thinks the stimulus is working, and it doesn’t want you on its payroll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 8, 2009To hear President Obama tell it, he’s been busy creating jobs since taking office. The $787 billion stimulus package, he said last winter, would “save or create 3.5 million jobs.” The White House is touting reports from recipients of stimulus funds asserting that they have created or saved 640,000 jobs so far.
Yet the national unemployment rate has now hit 10.2 percent, helping explain why Republicans won the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey last week, just a year after the party’s 2008 drubbing. And Obama declared Friday that more action is needed.
“History tells us that job growth always lags behind economic growth, which is why we have to continue to pursue measures that will create new jobs,” he said. “And I can promise you that I won’t let up until the Americans who want to find work can find work.”
It was a strong vow, but it raises a question: Why has a White House that talks so much about boosting employment steered clear of the most direct strategy that could keep Americans on the job?
Since taking office, the Obama administration has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing workers’ private-sector employment or by creating new government-paid jobs. There are programs in a handful of states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours to prevent broader layoffs at their companies — an approach that costs relatively little, since it results in lower payouts of unemployment benefits, and that has helped Germany keep unemployment under 8 percent despite the deep slowdown there. But the Obama administration has so far opted not to expand this initiative. And aside from a small summer employment program for young people, it has not sought to create jobs on the public payroll, something the country did in the 1930s and 1970s.
Much more at the link.
As it happens, I agree with the President’s approach, in not trying to create a lot of directly-paid government jobs; that winds up being self-perpetuating, and somehow, someway, those jobs are far too slow to disappear once the private sector starts creating new jobs.
But I’d note here that the Bureau of Labor Statistics October report said that there were 15.7 million people out of work. If we just gave the $787 billion to those 15.7 million unemployed, we’d be giving them $50,127 apiece, significantly more than the 2008 median wage of $35,100. Heck, you figure in the taxes someone has to pay on the median wage, plus the costs associated with working — transportation, lunch at work, child care for some people — and $50,127, if not taxed, would come pretty close to two years’ wages. We still be the $787 billion in debt that the porkulus plan put us, but some of that would be recouped because we wouldn’t be paying standard unemployment compensation.
It’s all those shovel ready jobs. Anyone shoveling horse manure for Obama has plenty of work.
Dana:“But I’d note here that the Bureau of Labor Statistics October report said that there were 15.7 million people out of work. If we just gave the $787 billion to those 15.7 million unemployed, we’d be giving them $50,127 apiece, significantly more than the 2008 median wage of $35,100.”
If we did that, then the financial system would have collapsed (Hank Paulson), Great Depression 2.0 would have begun, and that $35,100 would have disappeared. In between standing in soup lines, we would be selling apples on the corner. And Obama would have morphed into another FDR! Are you really wishing for all these unintended consequences?
Perry, you have made loads of accusations and conjectures. Provide citations for them all. Or admit you made all that stuff up.
One of the more interesting things I saw during the stimulus debate was a chart saying that extending unemployment benefits and increasing food stamp allotments were the forms of stimulus that provided the government the highest return on investment (around $1.80 for every dollar in spending).
The point is that direct payment of cash to poor people is probably the best way of dealing with unemployment, welfare, and the like. Even Milton Friedman saw that. Whether it’s standard monthly unemployment benefits, the “reverse income tax” that Friedman proposed (we call it the EITC), or the lump-sum benefits you propose, I think most economists agree that that’s a better solution than just creating government jobs as was done in the New Deal.
Oh, and John – I think Perry was being sarcastic there
…somehow, someway, those jobs are far too slow to disappear once the private sector starts creating new jobs.
What’s the old adage – “there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program”?
John, I just repeated what Hank Paulson said. Have you forgotten already?
Jeff was right about the rest of it!
Perry, you misinterpreted: the $787 billion was the stimulus plan money, not the TARP bailout money.
Even so, you wrote:
Emphasis mine. At best, you could have said might, not would, because you just flat don’t know. Many things were said during October of 2008, stories of gloom, despair and agony, but no actual proof. The TARP bailout was sold, true enough, but we really don’t know that it had to be done.
Jeff, Perry is all over everywhere demanding citations for everything, even when those citations were in the previous article. Perry is all over everywhere demanding if people don’t provide those citations for him, they are liars and should shut up. And when people provide citations to prove their points and the authoritarian, censorship-loving Perry to be willfully blind and deaf, he never makes a retraction, never even acknowledges links provided, never does any of that. Instead, Perry runs off somewhere else and again in arrogant blindness and deafness demands more citations (else be “proven” a liar).
Thus, I have deemed him a “Helen Keller” partisan. And that’s why I demanded citations from him, citations he has refused to provide. I have demanded citations from him elsewhere regarding other bovine byproduct he was peddling but, as usual, he had nothing. It’s all a deaf and blind game to him; truth is irrelevant to him. Partisanship is all Perry lives for on conservative blogs.
The additional drain on the economy passed last night, Healthcare Reform, This $2T monster will make 10.2% unemployment look like full employment when it starts to siphon more money from the economy.