Michigan Ranks Third Worst For Employment But Gov. Rick Snyder Wants More Immigrants

Here's our insane governor last night:

"We need to encourage immigration in our state," said Snyder, who has backed national reform efforts. "That's how we made our country great. We need to focus on legal immigration to make sure Michigan is the most welcoming place."

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Too bad Michigan isn't a more welcoming place for the unemployed who already live here.

White Hat Hacker Says Security On Healthcare.gov Is Worse Now Than In November

David Kennedy, quoted here by NBC News:

“The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied. You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath. Nothing’s really changed since our November 19 testimony. In fact, it’s worse. Some issues still include critical or high-risk findings to personal information."

Corelogic Foreclosure Rate In November 2013 Still 119% Above Normal Pre-Crisis Rate

As reported here on January 9th:

There were 46,000 completed foreclosures in the United States in November 2013, down from 64,000 in November 2012, a year-over-year decrease of 29 percent. On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures decreased 8.3 percent, from 50,000 in October 2013. ... Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure. As a basis of comparison to the 46,000 completed foreclosures reported for November 2013, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006 before the decline in the housing market in 2007. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 4.7 million completed foreclosures across the country.

5.6 Million American Homes Repossessed 2006-2013

As reported here:

Including the 2013 numbers, over the past eight years 10.9 million U.S. properties have started the foreclosure process and 5.6 million have been repossessed by lenders through foreclosure.

Is It A Coincidence John Roberts' Law Clerk Is A Utopian Progressive?

Birds of a feather flock together.

Joshua D. Hawley, here, clearly a friend of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":

Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present. Or should I say, to immanentize the eschaton.

Laura Ingraham and Raymond Arroyo Discuss Spanish Healthcare.gov Slaughtering The Language

After which Raymond Arroyo uses the English phrase "full plethora".

You know, the opposite of which is the empty plethora.

Just now on the radio show.

Estimating Retirements Added To Those "Not In Labor Force" 2009-2013

It is often forgotten that retired people are classified as not in the labor force. The measure of those "Not in labor force" has grown to a staggering all time high of 92.338 million, not-seasonally-adjusted, as of December 2013.

Between 2009 and 2013 alone, the figure has grown by 11.05 million, and people like Rush Limbaugh thump loudly about all these people "not working" because of the bad economy.

The question is, though, how many of these are retirements?

I say it's theoretically possible that all of them are.

Those turning 66 years of age each year from 2009-2013 were born between 1943 and 1947.

And here are births from 1943 to 1947:

3.1 million 1943

2.9 million 1944

2.9 million 1945

3.4 million 1946

3.8 million 1947.

How many of these survived to age 66?

The CDC publishes annually the life tables, the latest of which came out a few days ago for the year 2009. A person aged 63 in 2009 (born in 1946) was among the 86% who survived to 63, according to the tables. In the 2008 tables from a year ago, that same person at age 62 was among the 87% who survived to 62. In the 2007 tables at 61 he was among the 88% who survived to 61. Extrapolating forward to 2012, we will estimate that at 66 he was among the 83% who survived.

So for persons born earlier than 1946 we can estimate their survival rate as follows:

Born in 1943, retiring at 66 in 2009: 80% survive, or 2.48 million

Born in 1944, retiring at 66 in 2010: 81% survive, or 2.35 million

Born in 1945, retiring at 66 in 2011: 82% survive, or 2.38 million

Born in 1946, retiring at 66 in 2012: 83% survive, or 2.82 million

Born in 1947, retiring at 66 in 2013: 84% survive, or 3.19 million.

Total theoretically possible retirees: 13.22 million, 2.17 million more than actually left the labor force.

Obviously, not everyone retires at 66. Some keep working. And especially these days some keep working because they have to. The employment level of the 55 and over set has grown by 4.5 million over the period 2009-2013.

It appears to be the case, however, that an even larger number are deferring both Social Security benefits and work because they can afford to: Social Security reports that retired workers and their dependents receiving benefits grew only 5.6 million from the end of 2008 to the end of 2013.

Of the 11.05 million added to "not in labor force", I'd estimate at least 5.4 million are well off enough to forgo both work and Social Security until they reach age 70, and perhaps more than that if Social Security recipients who continue to work according to the rules are counted instead as part of the labor force.

Manufacturing Jobs In 2014 Are At 1941 Levels

Is The All-Time High In Temporary Help Forecasting A Recession?

Why HealthCare.gov still isn't fixed: Obama regime quietly dumps CGI Federal on Friday, to hire Accenture which built California exchange

WaPo reports here:

The Obama administration has decided to jettison from HealthCare.gov the IT contractor, CGI Federal, that has been mainly responsible for building the defect-ridden online health insurance marketplace and has been immersed in the work of repairing it.

Federal health officials are preparing to sign early next week a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, according to a person familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private negotiations.

... it is not yet able to automatically enroll people eligible for Medicaid in states’ programs, compute exact amounts to be sent to insurers for their customers’ federal subsidies or tabulate precisely how many consumers have paid their insurance premiums and are therefore covered.

... As federal officials and contractors have been trying to fix various aspects of the Web site in the past few months, about half the new software code the company has written failed when it was first used, according to internal federal information.

"Bad" job reports for two years have been great for higher corporate earnings

Barry Ritholtz, here:

It has taken quite a long time for many investors to understand that reduced labor costs, greater productivity and ever-increasing efficiency has led to higher earnings. The basic assumptions about “good” or “bad” job reports may not be accurate relative to what equities do over time.

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That's correct. The latest employment situation report indicates that there hasn't been much change up or down in jobs for two years running even as the stock market made over fifty new all-time highs in 2013.

Additions to non-farm payrolls have been averaging 182,000 and 183,000 a month in 2013 and 2012. Same old same old.

To the unemployed: The L-shaped "recovery" continues . . . without you.

Obama draws a red line in America . . .

. . . of job losses, the worst in the post-war, 71 months and still counting.

Summertime peaks in full-time work continue to recover despite ObamaCare

There is still no evidence that the numbers usually working full-time are in decline because of ObamaCare.

Since the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010 the metric has made new highs each summer and shallower lows each winter.

Those usually working part-time have not increased in number since passage of ObamaCare in 2010

November 2008 through December 2013

And that's because the government measure of part-time doesn't care if you work 29 hours, 30 hours or 34 hours per week . . . all are equally part-time schedules to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The increasingly less deep lows in the summers since 2010 are consistent with the long term trend of increasing part-time work as population grows. Significant new highs above 28 million, however, remain non-existent.

Crony Capitalism Is A Feature, Not A Bug, Of Contemporary Liberalism

Jeffrey Snider, here:

Employment grows not on the pace of redistribution-derived consumer spending in the lower classes, but as new firms innovate and grow to replace older firms that have seen their last days. Failure and rebirth are the capitalist "secrets", and demand always follows supply in that line. Interrupt it at your peril.

Unfortunately, we see in the 21st century a different strain of imperialism that is rooted in Hobson's preferred solutions to it. By giving government more power over industry and business, Hobson suggested that government would be able to end business agitation toward external colonialism. But in doing so, governments have introduced the seeds of cronyism that take the form of internal imperialism. Big businesses have achieved regulatory leverage in a manner that may preclude the innovation and business cycles from creating that positive economic trajectory. And monetary policy, all in the name of aggregate demand, appears to be playing a large role.

... OWS [Occupy Wall Street] and its sympathizers ... are really protesting their own philosophies put into practice via a bastardized capitalism - so corrupted by devotion to aggregate demand in this era that it can hardly be referred to as such.

There will never be, and has never been, any such thing as fully free markets, nor should there be. What we are arguing is not absolutes but proportions. ... In perhaps the greatest and most tragic of ironies here, the Fed appeals directly to inflation as a means to destroy savings, an impulse to which I have to think Hobson would readily approve, but that inflation is itself a means of redistribution that further concentrates savings among the wealthy. More than an irony, it seems as if this inconsistency is a feature of this philosophy, as taken to its logical ends it produces something akin to circular reasoning. It is a place where the socialists of OWS criticize directly the tools of socialist monetary policy as if they are anything apart from each other.

New study finds psychotic episodes occur at an earlier age among marijuana users

Yahoo reports here:

Among more than 400 people in South London admitted to hospitals with a diagnosed psychotic episode, the study team found the heaviest smokers of high-potency cannabis averaged about six years younger than patients who had not been smoking pot. ... The researchers found that males were more likely overall to use cannabis and also had a younger age of onset of psychosis. The mean age at the time of the first psychotic episode for male users of cannabis was 26, and for female users was nearly 29. That compared with nearly 30 years old for male non-users and 32 for female non-users.

December 2013 Unemployment Falls To 6.7%, Total Nonfarm Jobs Up Only 74,000

The employment situation report for December 2013 is here.

The headline rate falls to 6.7% ending 5 years of unemployment at or above 7%, with massive numbers of people continuing to leave the labor force.

In the last year the number counted as unemployed fell 1.9 million, while nonfarm employment grew at a rate of 182,000 per month in 2013 vs. 183,000 per month in 2012, or 2.18 million. Roughly a wash.

Total nonfarm employment continues below the 2007/2008 peak of 138.1 million, still lagging that level by 1.2 million fully 6 years later (seasonally adjusted) despite growth in the population since that time of at least 14.3 million.

The headline unemployment rate has fallen from 7.9% at the beginning of 2013 to 6.7% at the end largely because those not in the labor force increased by 2.89 million in the last year (not-seasonally-adjusted). The not-seasonally-adjusted level reached a new high at 92.338 million. People who leave the labor force are not counted as unemployed.

In the 8 years from 2001 through 2008 under Bush those not in the labor force increased by 10.3 million, or 14.7%. That record has already been matched under just 5 years of Obama: 11.3 million have left the labor force, or 14.0% (numbers seasonally adjusted).

The civilian labor force participation rate, the percentage of working age people actually working, remains mired at Carter administration levels from 1977 and 1978.

 

Drudge's New Headline Writer Can't Spell To Save His Life: Makes At Least 6 Errors This Morning

knockout

roommate

opponents'

children's

anti-Semitic

Fournier

Rush Limbaugh Today Totally Botches Income Quintiles On The Program

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The relevant passage is here:

Poverty is expressed as an income level. Most economists break down income in America to five brackets, called quintiles, and people move in and out of these. The top quintile, I think, is like a million plus, and that'd be the top 1% of 1%. I forgot what the breakdown is, but the poverty level, it's roughly, what, $14,000 for a family of four? It's around there. People move in and out of these all the time.

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This is rich.

A quintile in this instance is one of any of the five groups of American households divided into those five groups based on how much money they make.

By definition, then, the top quintile is the richest 20% of households in America. So it's impossible for the top quintile to be "the top 1%", let alone "the top 1% of 1%".

As embarrassing as that is, Rush has absolutely no concept what it means to reach the top 20% of household income in this country.

The fact is it doesn't take all that much, and certainly nothing close to $1 million, hard as it may be to get there.

Currently the point in the middle of the top 20% of households by income is only about $181,905 per annum. That means about half the people in the top quintile make more than that, and about half make less. And interestingly enough, the middle of the richest 5% of households in this country isn't anywhere close to $1 million, either. The average household income of the top 5% is just $318,052. (For a good presentation of the data, see here.)

And Rush is equally out of touch about what it means to be poor. The federal definition for a family of four is about $23,500, not $14,000. The latter is about what it means for just one person to be poor, not four (see here).

Rush Limbaugh complains constantly about the sorry state of public education in this country. He even did so today in the same segment:

[L]ook at [President] Johnson's solutions. Education, job training, medical care, housing. That hasn't changed. The same weapons, the same language, the same way they tug at heartstrings. It's 1964, and they keep using the same lingo, obviously because it works. But look at how our education system's been since 1964 with them in charge.

Yep. Look at how it's been.

Rush is Exhibit A . . . the most popular radio host ever for a reason.

24hour Minimum Temperatures In The Lower 48 Yesterday And Today