Each release of economic data is trumpeted as more good news in an economic recovery. Most of the mainstream media do their best to support the propaganda that government reports represent. Anything beyond a superficial examination of the economy reveals that There IS NO RECOVERY UNDERWAY. Nor can there be a recovery until the debt problem is solved. IT CAN ONLY BE SOLVED VIA MASSIVE DEFAULTS.
Until government spending is cut dramatically (in the hundreds of billions of dollars this year and more next year) debt keeps growing. Instead of cutting spending, the government engages in their extend and pretend scam of adding more debt to juice the GDP numbers. It hasn’t worked and will not work. This policy will destroy the economy and the country.
The recent employment report, heralded as more evidence that the economy is recovering, is just the latest example of the hype and propaganda. My recent post, A Sign of a Dying Economy, provided one perspective that employment was not improving. Here are three different perspectives:
1. From Reader EBW
Employment ain’t what it used to be: 66% of employment advance was in part-timers, no income growth, 29% of full time growth was low-paying, and bogus birth/death adding 117m
“where two-thirds of the employment advance last month was in part-time, not full-time, workers,” and the number of people laboring part-time because of economic reasons mounted by 93,000.
And in any case, the improvement has yet to generate “organic income growth”
folks out of work for 99 weeks or longer accounted for 13.5% of the unemployed, up from 7.5% a year ago, and what they call the eat, drink and get sick sectors (a.k.a. restaurants, bars and health care), where jobs tend to be relatively low-paying, account for 19% of total employment, but chipped in an outsized 29% of last month’s overall gain.
That win at beat-the-number, government-style, was aided by 117,000 birth/death jobs, a figure 44% higher than last year’s (with the construction component of these theoretical jobs growing 50% year-over-year!
2. American Thinker
The second perspective is provided by Randall Hoven in American Thinker. He looks at the issue from the standpoint of what the “experts” promised versus what actually happened. Note also how the mainstream media echoes the government propaganda:
As the Recovery Act crossed the one year mark, newspaper editorial boards across the country took a good, hard look at the program and weighed in on its impact. From the St. Petersburg Times’ evaluation that ‘One year later, stimulus shows results in Florida’ to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s verdict that ‘the stimulus rescued America,’ consensus is growing that the Recovery Act has pulled us back from the brink of economic disaster and is working to create jobs and drive economic growth. These editorials join a growing chorus of independent experts who say the Recovery Act is already responsible for as many as 2.1 million jobs nationwide and provide a look at how theRecovery Act is at work in communities across the country.” February 2010.
Sources: Geoff, via AoSHQ, and the St. Louis Fed/FRED.
Hoven’s Index for April 2, 2011Jobs lost since the stimulus was passed (Feb. 2009 to Mar. 2011): 2,099,000Percentage gain in jobs since end of recession (June 2009 to Mar. 2011): 0.19%Jobs gained in past year (Mar 2010 to Mar 2011): 1,300,000Years to reach 2007 peak in jobs at that pace: 5.6 (Oct. 2016)
Moses Kim provides his own assessment, suggesting that unemployment could go up rather than down from here:
The current unemployment situation is very interesting in that it can be read as both bullish and bearish. Unemployment has definitely recovered from the depths of despair in 2009. However, the recovery in unemployment has been very, very weak on a historical basis. With unemployment set to rise dramatically in the public sector, don’t expect the unemployment rate to fall much further. This is not your normal post-recession recovery. We still have a debt crisis on our hands that has not been resolved. Governments still need to cut jobs to balance their budgets. Although the perception is that the employment picture can only get better, the truth is that significant pressure in the labor market lies ahead.
Mr. Kim’s observations certainly are true at the State and Local levels where balanced budgets (of sorts) are required and no printing press is available to continue spending. Ultimately spending cuts will happen at the Federal level, whether the politicians want them or not.
Our fiscal condition is analogous to a bleeding patient. Ultimately, all bleeding stops. It is merely a question of whether a physician stops it and saves the patient or the bleeding continues until death.
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