“Regardless of what the government reports, Gallup’s unemployment and underemployment measures show a sharp deterioration in job market conditions since mid-January.”
That sentence is in Gallup’s latest unemployment survey, which finds that official unemployment is back up after dipping in January. Holiday hiring will tend to do that. What are you trying to say, Gallup? That an opaque regime known for its distant relationship with truth might cook the books?
The U.S. unemployment rate, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 9.0% in mid-February, up from 8.6% for January. The mid-month reading normally reflects what the U.S. government reports for the entire month, and is up from 8.3% in mid-January.
High gas prices are not going to help.
Gallup also finds 10.0% of U.S. employees in mid-February are working part time but want full-time work, essentially the same as in January. The mid-February reading means the percentage of Americans who can only find part-time work remains close to its high since Gallup began measuring employment status in January 2010.
The media used to report that as “underemployment,” when Republicans were in the White House.
Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 19.0% in mid-February. This is higher than the 18.7% recorded for January, and is up significantly compared with January’s mid-month reading of 18.1%.
High gas prices aren’t going to help that either. Obama’s answer to all this seems to be more of the same failed policies: More strangulation by regulation, more confiscation to pay for government subsidies, more demagoguery when leadership is needed. And, a lowering of national expectations.
Four years after winning the White House, Obama is dealing with a different economic and political reality as he seeks re-election. He’s focused less on a lofty vision for overcoming divisions and remaking Washington, and more on the most basic building blocks of middle-class economic security: a job, a house, a college education for the kids, health care, money for retirement.
Even that may be out of reach: The economy is projected to crash under the weight of Obama’s unsustainable debt and the entitlement spending he refuses to reform, in 2027. The regime’s plan? It doesn’t have one. So the Obama’s tax-cheating Treasury man tries his hand at comedy.
If not averted, that crash happens just 15 years from now; most of us reading this will be alive and many of us nearing or in retirement years when Obama’s house of cards gets blown down by the breeze. I wonder, how did retirement work in Weimar Germany?
How’s that hopeychangey fundamental transformation working out, again?
h/t Ace
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