OK, let's be honest: Racism is so yesterday when unpatriotic Republicans and Democrats get rich and get votes off cheap foreign labor

Republicans specialize in spending money on putting Americans out of work, by importing cheap foreign labor and giving tax breaks to job-exporting corporations

Don't piss down my back Brainard and tell me this is full employment, beyond full employment, or pearly shells

I love Pearly Shells.

Fed's Brainard: US economy at or beyond full employment

Twelve years ago 63.4% of the population had a job. In November 2018 it's just 60.6%. We could easily have 164 million employed. Instead we've got only 156.8 million, 7.2 million fewer adjusted for population.

At the rate we're going it'll be the year 2025 before we're back to 63%.

Brainard knows NOTHING!

We don't need any more immigrants: Population increases have outpaced labor force increases for a decade

Before the Great Recession the growth rate of the labor force easily exceeded the growth rate of population for decade after decade, but since then the situation has reversed dramatically.

Population has been increasing at a rate 75% higher than the labor force over the last decade. The increased population is not assimilating to work.

THERE IS NO LABOR SHORTAGE.

Increasing the population of the non-working has been the number one drag on the economy, causing GDP to fall and debt to rise, negatively impacting every standard measure.

Piers Morgan: Trump is kicking Democrats' ass

Piers Morgan, here:

According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is now at 47% approval, compared to Obama’s 45% two weeks before the midterm elections in 2010. ...

And I see a President who’s growing stronger by the day.

Trump’s become a political Godzilla, crushing everyone who dares challenge him and bulldozing his way through an agenda that is beginning to pay real dividends.

In less than two years, Trump’s got two nominees onto the Supreme Court, entrenching a Conservative majority.

He’s slashed taxes, and regulations – sparking a boom in the US economy that shows no sign of stopping, a surge in jobs and record low unemployment.

Trump’s forged a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, launched a trade war with China that many think is long overdue, withdrawn from the obviously flawed Iran nuclear deal and Trans-Pacific Partnership, forced Mexico and Canada to update NAFTA, bullied NATO countries into paying their bills, and bombed ISIS out of Iraq and Syria.

He’s also clamped down hard on illegal immigration.

As I write this, a ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Central American migrants – most of them from Honduras - is moving towards the Southern border.

They intend trying to enter the United States illegally.

It’s hard to think of a more powerful image to vindicate Trump’s much criticized demand for a new ‘Wall’, isn’t it?

Alan Greenspan's tight labor market is fake news: Unemployment is really 8.4%

In September 2018, the civilian labor force was just 62.7% of the civilian noninstitutional population (161.958 million X 100 / 258.290 million = 62.7).

Not seasonally adjusted, this yielded an unemployment rate of 3.6% (5.766 million unemployed X 100 / 161.958 million = 3.56, before rounding up).

Unfortunately that's only because the labor force shrank by 8.5 million since 2008. The labor force then averaged 66% of the civilian noninstitutional population, not today's 62.7%.

Taking 66% of September 2018's civilian noninstitutional population means a labor force of 170.5 million instead of the not quite 162 million we've actually got. Where'd all those 8.5 million go? New Zealand?

Add 'em back in on both sides of the equation, both to the size of the labor force and to the unemployed, because they are obviously not working, and unemployment soars to . . . 8.4% (14.266 million unemployed X 100 / 170.458 million = 8.36).

All this labor slack is the reason wages fail to go up at rates of 3-4% as in previous recoveries.

It's not a tight labor market.

If we had 66% of the population in the labor force like we still did in 2008, it would be 8.5 million larger in 2018 than it is

dailyvaluewatch.blogspot.com

It's a myth that we need more immigrants when the share of population increases joining the labor force is down 59%

W-2 payroll data for 2017 just out shows huge slowdown to monthly additions from 2016

Monthly additions dropped from 227,000 (revised up 4,000) in 2016 to 160,000 in 2017 (figures rounded to the nearest thousand).

There were a number of other revisions to the data in this series of more minor significance (incorporated).

Total nonfarm December 2017 on December 2016 was up 182,000 monthly. The civilian employment level was up 149,000 monthly.

Since the Great Recession, Hispanics took over 4 jobs for every job going to whites, Blacks took 2, and Asians nearly 2

Hispanics and Blacks got all the jobs since 2007, whites got bupkis

Hispanic jobs are up 6.5 million, or 31%.

Black jobs are up 3.1 million, or 19%.

White jobs are up 1.2 million, or 1%.

That means over 60% of all these jobs went to Hispanics, 29% to Blacks, and 11% to whites. And they say the whites are the racists.

WHITE

BLACK

HISPANIC

Trump has created more jobs in his first 22 months than any Republican in the post-war and comes in 4th overall

Portland company Webtrends claimed Kavanaugh accuser Swetnick made false sex allegations against employees

Julie Swetnick, a Brett Kavanaugh accuser, faced misconduct allegations at Portland company:

In the suit, Webtrends alleged Swetnick claimed to have graduated from Johns Hopkins University but the company said it subsequently learned the school had no record of her attendance. Webtrends said she also "falsely described her work experience" at a prior employer.

The suit also alleges Swetnick "engaged in unwelcome, sexually offensive conduct" while at Webtrends and "made false and retaliatory allegations that other co-workers had engaged in inappropriate conduct toward her."

The suit alleges Swetnick "engaged in unwelcome sexual innuendo and inappropriate conduct" directed at two male employees during a business lunch, with Webtrends customers present. Swetnick claimed two other employees had sexually harassed her, according to the suit.

Webtrends' suit said it determined Swetnick had engaged in misconduct but could not find evidence to support her allegations against her colleagues. Later, the company alleged, Swetnick took medical leave and simultaneously claimed unemployment benefits in the District of Columbia.

Sorry Charlie: Jeff Cox of CNBC wildly exaggerates wages under Trump, "the last missing piece of the economic recovery"

Here in "Trump has set economic growth on fire":

Friday brought another round of good news: Nonfarm payrolls rose by a better-than-expected 201,000 and wages, the last missing piece of the economic recovery, increased by 2.9 percent year over year to the highest level since April 2009. That made it the best gain since the recession ended in June 2009. ... Indeed, the economy does seem to be on fire, and it's fairly easy to draw a straight line from Trump's policies to the current trends.

The wage series used by Cox for all workers differs little in August 2018 from the series for the 80% of workers who are production and nonsupervisory, except that the latter goes back much farther than 2006, giving a truer picture of where we are at. And where we are at is slightly better off than under Obama, but that's about it. It's still not as good as under George W. Bush, for crying out loud. And it's certainly not "on fire".

This is not an economic boom for most working people.

Farmers and Republicans are thick as thieves with illegal aliens and sanctuary cities

It ain't just San Fran Freako, folks.

ICE Raids Dairy Farm Where Illegal Alien Accused of Killing Mollie Tibbetts Worked:

Illegal alien Cristhian Bahena-Rivera, a 24-year-old from Mexico, has been charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’ death after police say he admitted to confronting and chasing down the young woman. The illegal alien lived in a region of Iowa that was surrounded by sanctuary cities, as Breitbart News noted, and an initial autopsy report revealed that Bahena-Rivera allegedly stabbed Tibbetts to death. ...

That dairy farm where Bahena-Rivera worked, Yarrabee Farms, owns the property and trailer where the illegal alien had been living and which, allegedly, many Mexican nationals frequented, as Breitbart News reported.

Eric Lang, one of the chief executives of Yarrabee Farms, is the brother of Craig Lang, who was the president of the Iowa Farm Bureau. The Farm Bureau has chapters all over the United States, with the goal of increasing the number of low-skilled foreign workers, specifically those on H-2A visas, who are allowed to enter the country every year.

As Breitbart News reported, Eric Lang is also married to Nicole Schlinger, who runs the GOP fundraising firm Campaign Headquarters in Brooklyn, Iowa.

Andrew Yarrow: Over 20 million men are not employed, five times the official 4 million

Excerpted from his book Man Out, here:

We’re left with the reality that the percentage of men not employed today is about three times what it was during the Truman and Eisenhower eras: well over 20 million men. Not the four million officially deemed to be unemployed.

The unemployment level for men averaged 4.18 million in 2016 and 3.73 million in 2017.

Noah Smith embraces the Trump narrative: "There’s no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a boom"

Here for Bloomberg.

After examining several indicators, which, however, are not unequivocal for their interpretation despite saying "no doubt", Noah Smith comes down on the side of improved sentiment as the cause of the current "boom".

On that we agree. There's a boom in sentiment.

The problem is, too many people are importing that improved sentiment into their reading of the data, and into their choice of the data.

For example, Smith focuses on job openings to unemployed, which is a tiny measure (6.66 million in June) of what's really going on in the labor market. But the broadest measures of unemployment still show 15.9 million unemployed, underemployed, and no longer counted in the labor force. There is still huge slack in the labor market, which is one reason why wages for the vast majority of workers are not rising like they would in a real economic boom (2.7% y/y in July vs. in the 4s in 2006/7).

Similarly Smith discusses the percent of population employed aged 25-54, but clearly misses that it's most definitely not "back to 2006 levels" as he claims (H1 2018 is at 79.2%, still below the 2006 average of 79.8% and also below the average of either half of 2006). The broadest measure of the percent employed, on the other hand, still shows a huge gap between now and the pre-Great Recession average when over 6 million more were employed than are at present (60.5% now vs. 62.9% then, on average).

The case is similar with domestic investment.

Smith chooses to highlight "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment: Fixed investment: Nonresidential (A008RE1Q156NBEA)" to show that "investment as a percentage of the economy is at about the level of the mid-2000s boom". But the current level in H1 2018 at 13.7% is also identical to H2 2014. Was that indicative of a boom? Did we blink and miss it? How about in H1 2008 when it was again at 13.7%? Was that indicative of a boom? If so, why did the economy then promptly crash in H2 2008?

A broader measure of domestic investment, however, "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment (A006RE1Q156NBEA)", shows us well off the 2006 peak and even the more recent 2015 level. Whatever we call what we have right now, the current 17.7% is still far below the 19.8% level of H1 2006, which itself failed to equal the boom level of the year 2000 (19.9%).

With all that cash unleashed by the tax reforms and sloshing around in the economy, one would think things would look a lot better than this, which simply shows that most of that money indeed went elsewhere.

GDP has been temporarily goosed by the tax reforms in concert with a fresh gusher of federal deficit spending. But those are one-offs. They will not, and cannot, be repeated over and over again in short succession.

We know what comes next.

Since the 1980s the share of job seekers relocating has fallen from more than a third to ten percent now

The Wall Street Journal reports via Mish, here:

The share of job seekers relocating for new employment has fallen dramatically since the late 1980s, when more than a third moved to take new opportunities elsewhere, according to surveys from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. In the 1990s, job-related moves ebbed and flowed between 20% and 35%, then fell below 20% after 2000. Roughly 10% of job seekers relocated for new opportunities in the first half of this year, Challenger said.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Yakima Washington Herald lets the cat out of the bag: American fruit grower rich enough to buy hotel to house foreign labor complains they make too much

Growers want more, cheaper guest workers:

Rob Valicoff is relying on 270 guest workers this year to pick his 1,700 acres of apples and pears in Wapato, nearly triple the 96 guest workers he used last year.

Under the federal H-2A guest worker program, growers are required to provide workers with housing, transportation, affordable meals and pay them higher wages.

“I’m excited now, to be honest,” he said. “Even if it costs more money, I’m excited for us not to be short of labor this year.” ...

One recent afternoon, more than 300 laborers filed into the dining hall at the former FairBridge Inn and Suites on North First Street in Yakima for dinner after a day in the fields.

Valicoff bought the 800-bed hotel and in June began housing H-2A workers from Mexico there. Some of the workers are employed by other growers, with Valicoff providing housing under an agreement with them.

Housing is free for workers, and they each pay $12.26 a day for three meals. They eat breakfast and dinner at the hotel and are provided sack lunches.

Valicoff would like to see changes that would require workers to pay a little more for meals and help with the cost of utilities.

“I think they need to pay a portion of that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a lot, maybe $6, $7 a day.”

He’d also like to see wages lowered for H-2A workers. The minimum wage is $14.12 an hour, above the state minimum wage of $11.50 an hour.