Not seasonally adjusted, total nonfarm employment remains 1.115 million below the November 2007 peak

Peak was 139,443,000 on November 1, 2007. On April 1, 2014 the level stood at 138,288,000.

The agony under rule by Democrats: 75 months later, 6.25 years, employment remains 113,000 short of the previous peak in 2007

For a graph and discussion, see Calculated Risk, here:

"This shows the depth of the recent employment recession - worse than any other post-war recession - and the relatively slow recovery due to the lingering effects of the housing bust and financial crisis." 

For a second graph and discussion, see here:

"This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms - this time aligned at maximum job losses.  At the recent pace of improvement, it appears employment will be back to pre-recession levels next month (Of course this doesn't include population growth)."

Unemployment plummets to 6.3%, 288,000 jobs are added in April and the stock market just shrugs its shoulders

The employment situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for April 2014 is here.

806,000 people dropped out of the labor force in April (seasonally adjusted), many of whom likely caused the unemployment rate to plunge 0.4 points to 6.3%. Fewer people not counted as unemployed even though they were unemployed makes the headline number drop. The not-seasonally-adjusted number leaving the civilian labor force was 782,000.

People are making too much of this data point, however. Granted, the drop was large for a March to April cycle. But key is that the civilian labor force level always peaks in July each year and then declines and rises again to a new high. It is not appreciated that a new all time high in the civilian labor force level was reached just last July at 157,196,000. True, the pace of achieving new peak levels was arrested after July 2008. Adding about 1.5 million to the labor force each summer as in the past would mean we should have been at about 163.8 million in the summer of 2013. We were off that pace by 6 million. The April 2014 level, however, was higher than the April 2013 level, which was higher than the April 2012 level, which was higher than the April 2011 level. The point is the civilian labor force level is climbing out of its hole, and the peaks and valleys prove it. When they stop proving it we should be concerned.

The 288,000 added to payrolls in April stands in vivid relief against the 190,000 average added to payrolls per month in the preceding twelve months. The employment level of those who are 25-54 years old surged 321,000 to 95,421,000, still almost 6 million under the November 2007 high. At 288,000 per month for a year, one could easily add almost 3.5 million to payrolls and in two years return the levels of those of prime working age to the previous peak.

Per hour earnings for all employees did not rise and remained flat. That is concerning, but at least production and nonsupervisory employees saw an increase.

The Case Shiller Home Price Index Shows Housing Prices Almost 20% Above The Long Term Mean Level

The current level of the Case Shiller Home Price Index is 152.48 and the mean level is 127.51.

About 140 on the index looks like the historical high water mark beyond which housing appears to be in a bubble, meaning we are in one.

Given the scale of the recent extreme housing bubble, housing should not have been prevented from correcting fully, probably well below 120, in order to reset the market on a surer basis. That might have prevented the current escalation in prices, which are unaffordable to almost everyone beneath upper middle class income levels of around $76,000.

Recent tirades against income inequality forget that the bottom half of the population typically has most of what wealth it has tied up in housing and is not well diversified. Loss of homes and home equity have been major drivers of income inequality under Barack Obama, compounded by loss of employment and housing policy inattention, even as stock markets have been driven higher by nominally positive policy through Obama's Federal Reserve chairs.

Obama sent money, after all, to Aunt Zeituni's family to help with her funeral, but he did not attend, and went golfing instead.

Are Democrats fanatical about abortion rights for unstated racist reasons?

Seen here:

New Jersey city council chairman and mayoral candidate Marie Strumolo Burke was caught on tape lamenting her city’s descent into a “fucking nigger town” — and nearly all media reports failed to identify her as a Democrat. Burke is chairman of Belleville, New Jersey’s city council and is running for mayor in the town’s June election. And yes, she is a member of the Democratic Party. In an undated recording of a voicemail left by a former council chairman, Burke’s voice can be heard in the background “discussing” proposed changes to the town’s tax rates. “This is terrible. This is terrible,” she can be heard moaning in the background. “This is gonna be a fucking nigger town!”

Catastrophic Q1 2014 GDP report at 0.1% makes 21 quarterly reports under Obama averaging just 1.76% each

The latest GDP report is here.

The decline in GDP in Q1 to 0.1% annualized was from 2.6% annualized in Q4 2013, a whopping 96% free fall. In other words, the economy did a panic stop, slamming on the brakes and hitting the wall.

Blaming it on the winter, for those of us who've seen more than fifty of them north of the Mason-Dixon Line, is laughable beyond belief. We don't hibernate like bears up here. We get up early and blow the snow off the 200 feet of driveway and get on with our day.

Here's the truth: Quarter on quarter durable goods consumption crashed over 70%, nondurable over 95%. Real nonresidential fixed investment was a catastrophe, the spread plummeting 136%. Residential investment added a decline of 5.7% to the previous quarter's decline of 7.9%. Exports went deep sea diving, the spread down 180% quarter on quarter, and the spread for imports was down even more, 193%. A slight uptick in government spending kept GDP barely positive.  

Five years of GDP reports under Obama have averaged just 1.24% per year, so the sixth year is off to a terrible start at 0.1%.

Eight years of GDP reports under Bush averaged 2.13% per year, pretty lame all by itself but 1.7 times better than Obama so far.

I'd take it in a heartbeat.

Obama's awful GDP explains lower incomes, long term unemployment, government dependency and loss of confidence

So says Investors.com here:

Had his recovery matched Ronald Reagan's growth rates, U.S. GDP would be $2 trillion bigger today. Had it matched John Kennedy's, it would be $3 trillion bigger. These aren't just abstract numbers. Obama's weak recovery explains why household incomes are lower than they were when the recession ended, why millions are long-term unemployed and millions more have given up looking for work, why government dependency is at all-time highs and why confidence is so low.

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Which is why our propagandists in the media have buried the most important story of our time. America's first black president is an abject failure.

MSNBC dingbat tries to tell the world Animal Farm wasn't aimed at the Soviet Union

Her name? Krystal Ball.

(With a name like that shouldn't she be doing the weather somewhere, or maybe the traffic? No, I know! Market futures!)

Here she is in all her dimness, trying to frame George Orwell's fairy story as a screed against capitalism:

Animal Farm, hmm. Isn't that Orwell's political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they're the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged?

Sorry, no. The original capitalist pigs were the communists, which is why the communists like "Krystal Ball" work so hard to make you think the opposite:

One publisher during the war, who had initially accepted Animal Farm, subsequently turned it down after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off. The publisher then wrote to Orwell, saying: "If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. "Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are."

In Orwell's London Letter for Partisan Review dated 17 April 1944 he stated how it was "next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed" because of the US, UK, Soviet alliance.

What's next from old Krystal? The OSS (formed in 1941) murdered Trotsky?

America Becomes France, Shrugs Shoulders Over Disastrous Q1 GDP Of 0.1%, News Media Avoid Story

No major news outlet makes the disaster of GDP under Obama, who owns the absolute worst record in the post-war, the lead story this morning except for business news outlets like CNBC and Marketwatch. ABC's story is a one line headline from AP. That's it! You have to actively go looking for the GDP story under "Money" or "Business" or "Economy" to find it just about everywhere even though it is the story of our time because it's the reason there are no jobs, no income growth, declining living standards and growing income inequality. All brought to you by Barack Hussein Obama, hm hm hm, who has turned America into a slum.

Q1 2014 GDP 0.1%: Consensus 1.2% Only Overestimated By 1100%, That's All!

The median priced existing home is affordable only to the highest reaches of the upper middle class

From an interesting discussion recently about what it means to be middle class, here:

One helpful yardstick to judge whether you're middle class: Median household income was $51,017 in 2012, according to the most recent U.S. census data. Robert Reich, a professor of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, has suggested the middle class be defined as households making 50 percent higher and lower than the median, which would mean the average middle class annual income is $25,500 to $76,500.

If you're in the middle of the middle, however – not lower or upper-middle class – that would be an income range between $39,764 and $64,582, says Aaron Pacitti, an assistant professor of economics at Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y.

Again, it isn't official. Nobody gets a membership card to the middle class.

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The former spread, $25,500 to $76,500, comes to about 53 million individual wage earners in 2012 according to Social Security wage statistics, out of almost 154 million total. This spread looks like it comes from dividing the total workers into thirds and seeing where the income lines fall . . . in other words, not a wealth driven measure but grading on the population curve. This means a third of wage earners (about 50 million) make less than $25,500 and a third make more than $76,500.

The latter spread, between $39,764 and $64,582, comes to just 20 million individual wage earners in 2012.

Typically, working couples must combine such incomes to enjoy middle class life styles, which usually means homeownership.

Perhaps a better way to measure membership in the middle class is through housing affordability. Often housing is deemed affordable at about 2.6 times earnings on an historical basis, which implies an existing home price to the $39,764 earner at $103,400 or lower, and $167,900 or lower to the $64,582 earner.

Unfortunately the US existing home median sales price in March 2014 was $198,500, which presently requires an income of $76,300 to be affordable. In other words, you've got to have extreme upper middle class household income just to afford the median priced existing home.

But the median household income in 2012 was just $51,017. That only supported an affordable home at $132,600 or less, not much of a home.

Three Cheers For Dana Rohrabacher: Christian Love Is Furthered By Individual, Not Government, Action

Quoted here at 218, the blog of the oligarchy:

"No. 1, a policy of legalizing the people who are here, the sort of easy way out, would in the long run put 40 million new people into our country, which would change the nature of our country, and that would be a bad thing, not to mention breaking the bank, etc."

“Also, my response was that Christian love is not furthered by advocacy of government policy but instead by individual action and commitment."

“Individual commitment is not individual commitment to changing a government policy, it is to come out and help specific people and people who are in need, and if [the pastors] really wanted to help people who are here illegally or in bad situations they, they want to pay for their health insurance and everything, then I would be saying how wonderful that is. But if they are advocating that the government do that, then it will break our bank and destroy our country.”

If Hillary Doesn't Run, Her Marxism Dictates That Chelsea Must . . . For Something: How About Ambassador To Libya To Get Her Started?

Libya accepts pregnant ambassadors, right?

Mickey Kaus, here:

The Clinton mode of production, then, is running for office or serving in office. That is the material basis for the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton lifestyle and the whole Clinton institutional structure. In order to keep this mode of production from breaking down, the Clintons–one of them, at any rate–must be at least potentially in the running for a powerful office at all times. If Hillary doesn’t really want to run, she can’t admit it in public. She must maintain the facade of candidacy until the last minute–or else the Foundation will have to cut back and Ira Magaziner might need to find a job. If it looks like Hillary might not run–perhaps because of health reasons–the model would predict that another Clinton, presumably daughter Chelsea, would start making noises about launching a political career. Voila! Data point confirmed. The theory is off to a good start. …

h/t Chris

Senate Republicans Kill Provision Requiring Disclosure Of Total Executed Annually By Drone

From The New York Times, here:

The provision, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year as part of its authorization bill, required Mr. Obama to make public an annual report on “the total number of combatants killed or injured during the preceding year by the use of targeted lethal force outside the United States by remotely piloted aircraft.” The provision was the same for civilians killed or injured. But officials said that the provision encountered almost immediate resistance both from intelligence officials and Republican lawmakers, some who have fought against any changes to the way the targeted killing program has been managed.

Beaver Pennsylvania: Home Of The $6.30 Screw Job

From the story here:

A widow was given ample notice before her $280,000 house was sold at a tax auction three years ago over $6.30 in unpaid interest, a Pennsylvania judge has ruled.

The decision last week turned down Eileen Battisti's request to reverse the September 2011 sale of her home outside Aliquippa in western Pennsylvania.

"I paid everything, and didn't know about the $6.30," Battisti said. "For the house to be sold just because of $6.30 is crazy."

Another story here says she owes a lot more than $6.30:

Tax records show that as of last week she has an outstanding balance of more than $20,000, including penalties and interest, for county, municipal and school taxes from 2009 to 2013.

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Beaver PA is the home of Boss Quay.

Papal iniquity: Let him who is without money among you cast the first stone

So the pope has tweeted that inequality is the root of social evil.

The redefinition of terms is startling, as if there were a difference between social evil and individual evil. The classic formulation from 1 Timothy 6 says the love of money is the root of all evil, so what we have here is a pope who is at best unanchored. According to Jesus, you cannot serve both God and Mammon.

Speaking of which, since the cost of Christian discipleship according to Jesus is personal poverty, when the fabulously wealthy papacy and the rest of the world's Catholics become as poor as the poor there will be reason to pay attention, but until then the pontweetification will remain just that, and disappear into the ether.

Next stop, an appearance on The Tonight Show?

New book details liberal disdain for the middle class

From Tom Bethell's review of it here:

Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses was published in 1930, but don’t be misled—its author was hostile to the masses. They had attained “complete social power,” and he resented that. The masses “neither should nor can direct their own personal existence.”

Fred Siegel’s Revolt Against the Masses (Encounter Books) takes issue with Ortega and can be seen as a belated corrective. A bracing, well-written reinterpretation of liberalism, Siegel’s new book identifies a political trend that has been in place for decades, yet is rarely noticed or mentioned.

It is subtitled “How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” Siegel calls them gentry liberals—our equivalent of old-fashioned Tories and every bit as class-conscious. In the 1960s they took up “the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights.”

His message, says Michael Barone, co-author The Almanac of American Politics, is that “the roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery.” 

Secretary of State John F Kerry does The Mussolini

The end of oligarchy

Oligarchy ends when the few who rule us become so few in number that they eventually resolve into a singularity, known as tyranny.

Matthew Continetti Thinks He Ought To Hear One Of The Oligarchs Complain About The Oligarchy

Here, in The Washington Free Beacon:

If the business editors of the [New York] Times were aware of the irony of lamenting the political influence of great wealth on one half of their page while handling it with kid gloves on the other, they gave no sign. “Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not,” says the article, before handing Cohen the microphone. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he said. Two paragraphs earlier, he had said, “My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities. I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

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Matthew needs to re-read that George Orwell line with which he starts the story, get his nose out of the Times and aim it in the direction of the Congress:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” 

I'll say.

The whole point of representation is that it be adequate to the task of balancing the influence of competing interests which all from time to time display the same shortcomings of human nature. Continetti's faith in the goodness of the Senate is shockingly naive. It especially misses the fact that the oligarchy it itself constitutes works hand in glove with the oligarchy of business by which it was captured long ago after state legislatures lost their right of electing them. The founders wanted the Senate to be an oligarchy of the interests of the states qua states, balanced by a House of the people which grew in size as the country did, but we willingly gave that up long ago when Senators became popularly elected and Congressmen fixed their number based on the population level of the 1920 US Census. Now every important issue hangs in the balance depending on what just one or two men or women can do in government, as when a Biden, a McConnell or a Boehner, a Pelosi or a Reid brokers some deal to get legislation passed. And almost always bad legislation.

Talk about oligarchy. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of government these days, there is one.

It is counterintuitive that in order for the people to have more control of their government, government has to be bigger, just not the part that's already too big, which it is precisely because the part that isn't anywhere near big enough is as small as it is.

Repeal the 17th Amendment, and expand the US House to its constitutional proportions: 10,566. It won't be perfect. It's not a panacea. Some measure will have to be taken to preclude the House and Senate from doing what they did before in concentrating power in their few hands. But there is no other alternative if we are to rescue ourselves from the miserable few who now tyrannize us routinely, as with ObamaCare. If we don't, the next step is a true tyranny of one.