(H/T: AoSHQ) This badly:
We are, literally, off of the chart: when they came up with the original they apparently didn’t think that we’d have an unemployment rate above 10%. But never fear: the President has a plan. He’s going to declare that passing health care rationing is the key for improving the economy – Mickey Kaus’ facepalm, or no…
Crossposted to RedState.
Tell me again why we’re not doing something about this?
The unemployment rate rose from 9.8 to 10.2 percent in October, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline (-190,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The largest job losses over the month were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.
Household Survey Data
In October, the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000 to 15.7 million. The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 10.2 percent, the highest rate since April 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by 8.2 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (10.7 percent) and whites (9.5 percent) rose in October. The jobless rates for adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (27.6 percent), blacks (15.7 percent), and Hispanics (13.1 percent) were little changed over the month. The unemployment rate for Asians was 7.5 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
Aside from the fact that if this administration does do something about this, they’ll have to explain why what they did back in the beginning of the year didn’t actually work. They probably don’t want to discuss the problem that Democratic legislators are more interested in passing cap-and-tax and health care rationing for their pet fringe groups than they are in fixing the economy. They definitely don’t want to talk about how a lot of this is due to moral cowardice on the part of the current ruling party…
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Also, dreading.
Now, I’m just a stay-at-home dad and liberal arts major whose most elevated exposure to mathematics was a how-database-vendors-will-lie-to-you-with statistics course when I was a grad student* – still, looking at that chart it certainly appears like we’re on schedule to have double digit unemployment throughout 2010. Which is worse than the worst-case scenario that the Democrats were screaming at us as the reason why we had to pass their ‘stimulus’ bill, and why we had to pass it now.
So why are we supposed to trust these people on health care, again?
Moe Lane
*Library Studies. Never got the degree, but met my wife and picked up job skills worth an extra ten grand a year, so worth it.
Crossposted to RedState.
Unsurprising – at least, unsurprising to me – yet not good:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September as employers cut more jobs than expected, evidence that the longest recession since the 1930s is still inflicting widespread pain.
And here’s the really cheery news:
If laid-off workers who have settled for part-time work or have given up looking for new jobs are included, the unemployment rate rose to 17 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994.
See the raw numbers here. I’m starting to notice the little details of higher unemployment, mostly in retail situations. It can be summed up as “customer service is generally better, when you can track somebody down to give you some.” Couple that with the indicators of a sour economy (if you do your own food shopping, you’ve noticed the problems with the produce aisle in your local supermarket; if you don’t, go ask somebody who does) and I’m not quite as cheery this morning as I could be.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
After a somewhat hopeful moment in July, Innocent Bystanders’ iconic graphic returns to being highly depressing:
(H/T: AoSHQ)
9.7, folks. They were expecting 9.5%.
Can we stop pretending now that the ‘stimulus’ was a good idea? Actually, let me restate that: can they stop pretending now that the ‘stimulus’ was a good idea? Note that I’m not even trying to suggest that the Democrats shut down the upcoming insane amounts of spending; getting them to admit that the entire idea was flawed is blue-sky enough as it is.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
It goes like this:
(pause)
…’this’ was turning into a lecture, even with bullet points.
(pause)
And the lecture was a lecture, too. Dull as dishwater – which is the problem. So to hell with it: Continue reading Obviously, we need to walk through minimum wage raises.
That’s House Minority Leader John Boehner’s response to CoS Rahm Emanuel’s rather… well, sad… statement that the White House has turned the economy around:
The word of the day is ‘Gulp.’
[UPDATE]: welcome, Instapundit readers. Umm… Zombies, cricket, and/or Tom Clancy?
Glenn Reynolds called this graph ‘scary’:
…which it is, mostly because of the implications of what the male unemployment rate is going to be when general unemployment hits double-digits; but it’s not scary enough. So I’ve improved it a touch:
…which I think will probably help get the underlying message a bit more attention. Particularly since the measures that we use to measure unemployment now are not the ones that we’ve used in the past. So there may be even a worse situation looming, from a sociological point view; I’m not even remotely one myself, but I do know that one of the basic rules of thumb is having too many young, unemployed males in the population is bad for a society’s stability.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, now would be a really good time to read up on 19th Century European history
Just a hint.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
I’m sure that they mean well.
The White House is promising solid economic growth by the end of this year:
White House Sees 3.5% Growth by Year-End, Exceeding Forecasts
May 11 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration projected that the U.S. economy will expand at a 3.5 percent annual rate by year-end, a rebound that would be almost twice as strong as private forecasters expect.
[snip]
As early as the end of this year, GDP may rise at a 3.5 percent annual rate, the same pace projected for all of next year, helped by a $787 billion stimulus package, the administration said in the report today. That’s more optimistic than the 1.8 percent fourth-quarter growth estimate in the monthly Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey released May 10.
Of course, this White House promised ‘only’ a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit this year; it’s now going to be $1.8 trillion, and probably rising. And it calculated an 8.1% unemployment rate for 2009 (last month’s was 8.9%, thanks largely to government seasonal work*). And then there’s this (via here): Continue reading White House predicts 3.5% growth by year’s end.
