The July unemployment figures came out on August 3 and they look better than recent months with 163,000 jobs added. But still the economy grew at only 1.5% in the second quarter, a very poor rate of growth.
Generally the American economy has rebounded strongly after recessions. But decades of socialism have strangled it. We now have tens of millions of idle people living off of the taxpayer like never before in our history while more than 20 million government workers are living very well as the taxpayer funds their lifestyles and becomes poorer through taxation.
Meanwhile wealth-creating manufacturing has been pushed from our shores by Democrat policies like over-taxation and overregulation, while many millions are out of work in rural America because of the endless crusade by modern-day environmentalists against economic development there (logging, mining, quarrying, manufacturing etc.)
So why is the economy responding at all even though Democrat policies are hurtful and the “official” national unemployment rate remains far too high at 8.3%?
Several factors are contributing to the economy only “treading water” and not sinking out of sight:
*Republicans won a huge electoral victory in November 2010. This offered psychological relief to millions of businesspeople who are terrified of Obama policies.
*The lower Bush-era tax rates are still in effect. Even Obama supported them so that the economy would not sink under his watch.
*Obama’s massive deficit spending is stimulating the economy, but artificially and temporarily. Because it also is creating harmful debt so that that stimulus is false and ultimately counterproductive.
*The Social Security ‘tax holiday’ for workers is keeping an estimated $100 billion in the private economy, stimulating it and keeping that money out of the hands of the government. But again, that is being paid for long-term by harmful debt.
*Millions who have dropped out of the labor force are not being counted, keeping the “official” unemployment rate artificially low.
And don’t forget that next January 1 is Taxmageddon Day when many taxes will spike. This will push the economy back into recession unless major reforms are made starting with big cuts in government spending.
So we saw some job growth in July. But the real story is told elsewhere, in the so-called U-6 number, explained by the Wall Street Journal on online.wsj.com:
While it’s the government’s unemployment rate (8.3%) that moves headlines every month … the “under-employment” rate, or “U-6” rate, includes everyone else affected by the moribund job market: people who want to work but haven’t looked in the last four weeks because they figured no jobs were available and those working part-time gigs but would prefer full-time positions.
Here are the U-6 unemployment numbers for several states including the most liberal state in the nation, California:
California 20.3% Illinois 16.5% Louisiana 13% Ohio 14% North Carolina 17.5% North Dakota 6.1% (yes, 6.1%)
And remember that these “official” U-6 numbers also don’t include the millions of people who have simply dropped out of the labor market entirely in the last few years, who have completely given up on finding jobs under Obama.
Or the millions of fraud cases in the Social Security disability system – 10 million Americans now collect SS disability checks. Millions of these claims are fake. Yet those millions of people are never counted as “unemployed”; they are called “disabled”.
In fact in June more people applied for SS disability than found jobs. That is extremely disturbing.
When you really add up what is going on in the economy, it is a socialistic disaster. Unemployment is really 20% or more nationally. And this dismal news is being papered over by an Obama-loving media.
Now consider the types of jobs being created. Only 25,000 of the jobs created in July were in manufacturing which generally are the best-paid jobs. So are 100 low-paid nursing home jobs in Vermont or 100 retail jobs in Michigan at $8 an hour going to have the same positive long-term impact as 100 manufacturing jobs in Alabama at $25 an hour?
Of course not. Yet they are counted the same. And look at this tidbit from online.wsj.com:
In the July jobs report, half of the 25,000 new manufacturing positions were in the auto industry, where companies have been cutting back annual summer shutdowns, resulting in fewer laid-off workers.
Wow. Many of the best jobs may well have been achieved through General Motors and Chrysler intentionally keeping plants open to help Obama, who bailed them out.
This is more false growth, along with government-funded purchases of the disastrous Chevy Volt.
Is the 8.3% unemployment rate a good sign?
No. And this is the greatest deception of all. This is socialism at work. Since the end of World War II, US unemployment has typically been around 5% to 6% except for recessions. And that did not routinely include millions of uncounted people as the rate does today.
Now we are supposed to cheer that unemployment is below 9%. This is how socialism lowers expectations and makes citizens happy with bad news, high unemployment and increasing poverty. This is the “new normal” of ObamaNomics, just as tens of millions on the government dole are “the new normal”. They are now happy with their subsistence level of living.
This is how socialism slowly undermines entire nations. People eventually are encouraged to forget what real growth and prosperity looked like. And the Liberal Media make sure that they forget by reporting positively on anything they can including monthly job numbers that really are hiding an economic disaster.
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