First Black President Brings Record High Poverty And Inequality As The New Normal

You talkin' to me?

Hm. Imagine that.

From the Associated Press story, here:

The nation's poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America's slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama's recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation's households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

"We're in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "The fact we've seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we've just flatlined." ... 

"This lack of improvement in poverty is disappointing and discouraging," said John Iceland, a former Census Bureau chief of the poverty and health statistics branch who is now a Penn State sociology professor. "This lack of progress in poverty indicates that these small improvements in the economy are not yet being equally shared by all."

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in poverty, agreed.

"Everything's on hold, but at a bad level; poverty and income did not change much in 2012," he said. "So child poverty is still too high and family income is still too low. The recession may be over, but try to tell that to these struggling families. Don't expect things to change until the American economy begins to generate more jobs."

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Way to go, Brownie!

Real Median Income Falls 4.4% Under Obama, 6% Since 2007

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Way to go, Brownie!

Story here:

The median, or midpoint, income in June 2013 was $52,098. That's down from $54,478 in June 2009, when the recession officially ended. And it's below the $55,480 that the median household took in when the recession began in December 2007. The report says nearly every group is worse off than four years ago, except for those 65 to 74.

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"It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants." -- Aristotle, Politics

March Unemployment Drops To 7.6%, Full-Time Work Still In Depression

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The full pdf report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.

The official number of unemployed fell to 11.7 million from 12.0 million last month, but nearly 500,000 left the civilian labor force in the seasonally-adjusted measure. In the raw measure the civilian labor force participation rate is down to 63.1%, the only other example of which in the data going back to 1948 was in July 1976. Those not in the labor force rose year over year by about 2.5% to almost 90.5 million.

Multiple job-holding is up barely 2% year over year in the report. Full-time with a secondary part-time job is up 7.7% year over year. Holding two part-time jobs is down 7.9% year over year. Part-time for both voluntary and involuntary reasons is not much changed year over year: Voluntary is up about 1.2%, involuntary is actually down less than one half of one percent in the seasonally-adjusted category, but down 1.7% in the raw numbers. . . . I'm not yet seeing any convincing evidence in the data to date that ObamaCare is part-timing the country in general. Full-time by either measure is actually up a little, by about 0.7% year over year.

Total nonfarm employment is either 134.5 million not-seasonally-adjusted, or 135.2 million seasonally-adjusted, up less than 1.5% year over year. Peak was in January 2008 at 138 million seasonally-adjusted, so the depression in employment continues, driven by the loss of full-time jobs, which in the raw measure are still down 8.4 million from the July 2007 peak, or 6.8%.

Jobs added per month on average for the last year has been at the level of 169,000. Both January and February saw upward revisions to the previous reports of jobs added in the neighborhood of 30,000 each month. Jobs added in March at 88,000 looks like a big stall in the trend, but we'll have to wait a month or two for the revisions to say that with certainty.

At the current rate of job addition, Obama will be long gone (one hopes) before full-time jobs come back. Of the 169,000 jobs added per month on average in the last year, only somewhere between 63,000 and 73,000 are full-time per month based on the year over year gains in full-time. Call it 68,000 per month, that's 816,000 per year, so it will take only 10.3 more years to add back those 8.4 million full-time jobs we're down and get us back to the level of 2007 . . . in the year 2023.

Way to go, Brownie!

Boosting Minimum Wage 40% Reduces Youth Employment 25%

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Way to go, Brownie!

Story here:

In November 2007, teens represented 4.0% of the entire U.S. workforce. In November 2012, teens account for just 3.1% of the reduced U.S. workforce. At this point, jobs that were most likely to have been held by teens are 14 times more likely to have been negatively affected by the employment situation over the past five years than their numbers among the entire U.S. workforce would suggest.

In retrospect, it seems that the U.S. Congress' action to boost the minimum wage by nearly 41% in three stages from 2007 through 2009 without doing anything to boost the revenues of teen employers by an appropriate percentage to compensate them for their higher costs of doing business during this period of time wasn't such a hot idea.

Romney Is A Total Hypocrite On Hard-Money: To Him TARP Preserved The Dollar's Value!

Hard-money conservatives like Larry Kudlow who think Gov. Mitt Romney is actually serious about maintaining the value of the dollar ought to remember that Romney argued in October 2011 that the TARP bailout was designed to keep the currency worth something:

According to Governor Romney, the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package "was designed to keep not just a collapse of individual banking institutions, but to keep the entire currency of the country worth something."

Noting could be further from the truth and Romney knows it.

TARP was not sold as a program to prop-up the dollar; it was sold as a means of keeping credit markets liquid, to keep banks lending to business, so businesses would keep people employed.

Not surprisingly, from that perspective TARP has been a spectacular failure -- because as soon as Congress granted then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a blank check for $700 billion (along with near-dictatorial powers over the American financial services industry and de facto control over the U.S. economy), something changed.

Suddenly, instead of being a program to move illiquid mortgage-backed securities off the books of banks, TARP became a no-strings-attached cash infusion to favored financial institutions and corporations. 

Among the insiders who received the no-strings-attached cash were Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group – that’s what Romney and Cain were defending.

If borrowing money to spend on circumventing the failure necessary to the proper operation of free markets props up the value of the dollar, it hasn't worked very well.

Since the (first!) bailout of Chrysler signed into law by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 you now need $2.73 to buy what $1.00 did then.

Way to go Brownie!

a little hurricane humor there

GDP Revised Down For Q1 2012 From 2.2 Percent To 1.9 Percent

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Way to go, Brownie!

Here's the story from the horse's mouth:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2012 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2011, real GDP increased 3.0 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "advance" estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 2.2 percent (see "Revisions" on page 3).

The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, residential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

The deceleration in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected a deceleration in private inventory investment, an acceleration in imports, and a deceleration in nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by accelerations in exports and in PCE.

AIG, GM and Ally Financial Still Owe TARP Repayments to Feds

CNBC.com has the story here from Reuters:

The government pumped $68 billion into AIG . . . $50 billion in[to] GM . . . and $17 billion in[to] Ally Financial to save them from collapse during the 2007-2009 crisis. ...

Don't look at me. I just work here.

AIG has reduced its obligations to the U.S. government by more than 75 percent, while Treasury has recovered nearly half the TARP funds it put into GM and close to one-third of the money that went to Ally Financial.