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October 2, 2009

Obama yucks it up in Copenhagen while unemployment soars at home

Ed Lasky
Barack Obama's stewardship of the American economy, along with his fellow Democrats in Congress, continues to fail. Now we know why Barack Obama never agreed to release his college transcripts. He probably would have fared poorly.

Reuters reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut a deeper-than-expected 263,000 jobs in September, lifting the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, according to a government report on Friday that fueled fears the weak labor market could undermine economic recovery.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate was the highest since June 1983 and payrolls had now dropped for 21 consecutive months.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected non-farm payrolls to drop 180,000 in September and the unemployment rate to rise to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent the prior month. The poll was conducted before reports, including regional manufacturing surveys, showed some deterioration in employment measures.

The government revised job losses for July and August to show 13,000 more jobs lost than previously reported. Preliminary annual benchmark revisions, released together with September's employment report showed that total non-farm payroll employment for March would have to be revised down about 824,000.

Stubbornly high unemployment is viewed as the missing link in the economy's recovery from its worst recession in 70 years. The economy is believed to have started growing in the third quarter.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed people has risen by 7.6 million to 15.1 million, the department said. While the decline in payrolls has moderated from early this year, companies are still not hiring on a wide scale, likely waiting for a signal that the economic recovery
Cash for Clunkers was not even a short term fix because all it did was accelerate car purchases (often from European car companies at the expense of domestic companies) that otherwise would have been made in subsequent months. Cost to taxpayers for the freebies given to the purchasers: over 3 billion dollars. The month after the cash for clunkers program ended car sales plunged.

"Businesses quick to fire, slower to hire" reads a Wall Street Journal headline this morning. Businesses have been scolded by this president and Congressional leaders, pilloried by the press, threatened with vastly increased costs due to health care reform, beset by a raft of new rules and regulations to give government employees something to do with all their time and to justify their sky-high salaries and sweetheart pension contracts. They look at Washington and see union activists being given key positions of power.

Does any rational business look at the way the wind is blowing and choose to expand its workforce?

Meanwhile our fearful leader departs for Denmark to yuck it up with the international bureaucrats in an attempt to land some graft for his Chicago buddies.

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