Conservatives have declared a new class war, but it’s not on bankers earning seven-figure bonuses. Instead, as Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels told Politico recently, the “new privileged class in America” is government employees, who “are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.” We have to escape “public sector unions’ stranglehold on state and local governments,” agreed Mort Zuckerman, billionaire editor of U.S. News & World Report, “or it will crush us.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot ominously predicts “a showdown looming across the country between taxpayers and public employee unions over pay and pensions,” while the Heritage Foundation warns that “the more the government taxes, the more it can pay its unionized workers.”
This decades-old assault on government employees has acquired new potency at a time of widespread economic suffering and populist rage. But the attacks have little basis in reality. A recent study by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security finds that when such factors as education and work experience are accounted for, state and local employees earn 11 to 12 percent less than comparable private sector workers. Even when public employees’ relatively decent pensions and health coverage are included, their total compensation still lags behind workers in private industry. A separate analysis by the Center for Housing Policy finds that despite recent declines in home prices, police officers and elementary school teachers still don’t earn enough to buy a typical house in two out of five metro areas. Firefighters and librarians are unable to afford the median home in the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago metro areas. Nationwide, a school bus driver’s wage isn’t enough to pay rent on a standard two-bedroom apartment.
There’s so much important stuff in there, I’m just going to break that down into bullet points. Conservatives are going after public workers because they’re supposedly paid too well. But:
State and local employees earn less than people doing comparable work in the private sector.
Police teachers and elementary school teachers can’t afford to buy a home in nearly half of cities.
School bus drivers can’t afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
But these are the people we’re supposed to resent, according to conservatives. People driving buses and teaching kids, not bankers and lobbyists. The attacks on public sector workers often include stories of bus drivers making $100,000 per year and the like. Never mind that there are bankers who actively harmed our economy who get more in a bonus than that bus driver makes in a year of driving on crowded streets and getting people to work—what’s the truth of it?
Greater Greater Washington looked at what workers are making in the Washington, DC public transit system.
The average salary for a bus driver is $49,500, and the maximum is $58,600. On average, bus drivers earn an additional $7,400 in overtime pay. Which is to say, they work extra hours to make some extra money. Metro police make more – up to $86,900, and an average of $12,700 in overtime. The $100,000 bus driver wasn’t entirely a myth: four bus drivers and six train operators worked enough overtime to make $100,000 or more. But by far the most common situation would be for someone with years and years on the job to be making a base salary of more like $50,000—or, in the case of janitors, $40,000—and adding $5,000-$10,000 in overtime. Which is, again, extra pay for extra work.
These are the people we’re supposed to resent for their lavish lifestyles? And the people telling us to resent them are well-paid think tank fellows and billionaire media moguls?
It defies logic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t defy belief, because we’ve seen this kind of gall again and again.
Hope House, a shelter for victims of domestic violence answers question about the economy and family violence on their blog:
Does the bad economy cause domestic violence? The answer is “no”. However, it doesn’t help in situations where there is already abuse present. Economic stresses often lead to more frequent and more violent abuse when domestic violence is already present. It also creates more barriers to a woman’s ability to flee the situation.
Domestic violence is three times as likely to occur when couples are experiencing high levels of financial strain as when they are experiencing low levels of financial strain.
Women whose male partners experience two or more periods of unemployment over a 5-year study were almost three times as likely to be victims of intimate violence as were women whose partners were in stable jobs.
Three out of four domestic violence shelters report an increase in women seeking assistance from abuse since September 2008
Shelters across the country have been dealing with budget cuts for the last several years, even as the need for services increases.
The NY Times reports that, in New York’s recession-year court backlog, “Cases involving charges like assault by family members were up 18 percent statewide.” Philadelphia in 2009 saw a 67% increase in domestic homicides:
The increase in domestic violence in Philadelphia is mirrored nationally, and experts say it is linked, in part, to the recession. In fact, data indicate that domestic violence had been falling in the 15 years before the recession took hold last year.
In 2 separate instances, Philadelphia residents committed suicide this month after their homes had been sold at Philadelphia County Sheriff’s Mortgage Foreclosure Sale. The first case occured March 5th when Lynda Clark, a resident at 1833 S. Newkirk Street, in South Philadelphia, was found by Sheriff’s Deputies while posting notice that ejectment proceedings where underway. The second case occured on March 22nd when Gregory Bellows of 4320 Mitchell shot himself when Sheriff’s Deputies arrived enforce a Writ of Possession.
PhillyShortSale411.com has investigated both cases. We started this investigation today with the hope that we would be able to find some great inspirational lesson that would be helpful to other people facing foreclosure or maybe to agents who do short sales everyday. When that wasn’t working out we thought maybe we could figure out what we could have done to help these people. Unfortunately, all we found is 2 examples of people who lost hope and didn’t see a way out.
It is easy to see why these people might feel hopeless. The woman, living alone, with no family, can’t find a job. she could sell and walk away with a few thousand bucks but then where does she go? The man living for years off the equity in his house, again no family, no income, no credit, where is he going to live. He could do a Short Sale but where does he go from there?
Homicide investigators say a northwest Houston home under foreclosure apparently led the struggling residents to take their own lives.
Police arrived at approximately 11 p.m. Sunday to the home on Arncliffe Drive near Antoine Drive and found a married couple shot to death. The couple left notes that indicated the shootings were suicides and a result of financial difficulties including the foreclosure of their home.
Investigators say the couple were found on their bed with the suicide notes alongside of them.
ANTIOCH — A man fatally shot his wife, then took his own life early Thursday following marital and financial problems, police said.
A recent Gallup Poll took a look at how the long term unemployed are faring. Predictably, they found that worry, sadness, stress, and depression increase for those who are unemployed for 6 months or more. The bottom line from their findings:
These findings suggest that emotional wellbeing deteriorates with length of unemployment, and even those unemployed for less than a month are not immune from the stressors of joblessness. However, it is important to note that the data do not prove causality and that other explanations could exist. For example, individuals who experience lower emotional wellbeing may be more likely to become unemployed or to have difficulty finding new employment. Still, as unemployment drags on and optimism for finding a job in the near future declines, being without a job appears to be taking an emotional toll on unemployed individuals.
Catholic Charities reported this week that of the 9,800 people the counselors had approached since May 1 in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, 1,593 were referred for counseling because of signs of depression.
“It’s the fear of losing everything,” said Representative Anh Cao, a Republican from New Orleans who has assembled a response team to travel along the Gulf Coast to assess constituents’ needs.
Mr. Cao said he had met two fishermen in Plaquemines Parish who told him they were contemplating suicide. While those cases are “extreme,” Mr. Cao said, they reflect how some people “are approaching a point of despair.”
and
Researchers who studied the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill said coastal residents of Alaska saw a higher incidence of suicide, divorce, domestic violence and substance abuse. To this day, many are still dealing with the effects of the environmental damage, economic losses and lawsuits.
I realize this is not uplifting information. It’s grim, depressing stuff. As one of the long term unemployed, I’ve experienced the same feelings of despair and desperation.
Since these stories are not being widely covered, it’s important to bear witness to what is happening to the people who are being hurt by the recession/depression, and the failure of our leaders to respond correctly and creatively to it.
I agree that addressing the needs of small businesses, both in rhetoric and in policy, is a good step for Democrats. A big problem, however, is that according to the government, small businesses… aren’t so small. It varies by industry, with some having revenue limits and some having employment limits, but 500 employees is a common maximum (.pdf).
500 employees doesn’t make you Microsoft, but I don’t think it’s what voters have in mind when they hear about “small businesses.”
I have nothing to add to what Atrios said, really. Just that while helping small businesses is good, it would be really good if we had a language to distinguish between the mom and pop places people think of when they hear the term and the much larger operations that are often the reality of who’s getting aid.
Late last week we reported that Maine’s two Republican Senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, continued to back the Republican-led filibuster of the bill that would restore the lapsed federal unemployment assistance programs, fund state Medicaid programs and create infrastructure and summer youth jobs.
While the bill has been blocked in the Senate, an estimated 900,000 workers who have been jobless for six months or more have not received federal unemployment compensation. And tens of thousands more are losing their benefits every day.
This week Americans United for Change and AFSCME are running this TV ad in Maine, calling on Senators Collins and Snowe to drop their support of the filibuster and vote to pass the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act.
Our View: Snowe, Collins
should back Medicaid funding
Long-term deficits are a serious problem, but the jobs crisis requires our attention now.
A scaled-down version of the jobs bill will resurface in the U.S. Senate as soon as today, and despite concerns about growing long-term deficits, Maine’s senators should get on board.
The most immediate problem facing Maine and the nation is that the economy is growing slowly and producing too few new jobs. The failure to pass this bill now could result in public-sector layoffs that would add to our economic woes, not solve them. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe should find a way to vote “yes” on this legislation.
The bill would, among other things, provide aid to state Medicaid programs and take some pressure off budgets, including Maine’s. The current state budget assumed that $84 million would be coming from Washington, as was approved in an earlier version of the bill passed by the Senate.
If the federal government does not come through with this money, the Legislature could be called back into session to further reduce spending. That would likely result in cuts to human services and education funding, since that is where most state dollars are spent. These cuts would be distributed disproportionately, with the school districts most reliant on state funding taking the brunt of the cuts while communities with higher property values are less affected.
That would mean that although we are already struggling with high unemployment, we would see more people lose their jobs and incomes, leaving less money to circulate through our communities.
The jobs bill has fallen victim to a growing — and valid — concern about the nation’s long-term deficits, which are projected to exceed $1 trillion by the end of the fiscal year. But now is not the time to balance the budget.
In his testimony to Congress last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that the economy would never be stable until the gap between how much the government takes in and how much it spends is closed. But Bernanke said that shouldn’t happen until the economy has returned to normal. As long as the crisis still exists, Bernanke said, the government needs to continue taking “necessary policy actions to ease the recession and steady financial markets.”
The jobs bill has fallen victim to a highly charged political environment. Conservative Democrats, particularly ones from Republican-leaning states who face tough re-election challenges this year, have withdrawn their support, citing high-minded concerns about the state of government spending. New England’s three Republican senators, Collins, Snowe and Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who are not running for re-election this year, should cross party lines and back this necessary support for the weak recovery.
The message is being delivered. Will Maine’s Senators get it?
Congressman Darrell Issa on what he wouldn’t do with subpoena power if Republicans take the House of Representatives this November:
“I won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear that we’re going to subpoena everything.”
Greg Sargent says:
While that quote stops short of a full-fledged promise to never probe anything corporate America does, it’s nonetheless an extraordinary statement: It sounds like a pledge to go easier on big corporations.
Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. And it sounds like that in the context of the apology Rep. Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy Committee’s subcommittee for investigations, delivered to BP. And in the context of the fact that while he may have been the only one to come straight out and apologize, several other House Republicans delivered a similar message: The destruction of the Gulf and the economies of the Gulf states is not BP’s fault. This is the Republican agenda. And we have to fight it.
Because it’s not just BP, of course. It’s Massey Energy. It’s Halliburton. It’s Goldman Sachs. It’s hundreds of other corporations that haven’t made the headlines yet that put workers’ lives at risk, that put the environment at risk, that put our economy at risk.
We need more, not less, subpoenas and investigations and penalties for the damage they do.
It’s not a crime to owe money, and debtors’ prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
-snip-
Taxpayers foot the bill for arresting and jailing debtors. In many cases, Minnesota judges set bail at the amount owed.
In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 — less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.
It’s a long article worth reading in full, if you can stand to. Basically, debt collection agencies are using the police and courts to collect debts, at—and I know this is in the excerpt above but I’m going to repeat it—at taxpayer expense.
How does this work when we don’t have official debtors prisons? Simple. The collection agency sends you a notice. If you don’t show up in court, you can be arrested for contempt. And then your bail is set at the amount you owe. So the collection agency gets its money, and the costs of police carrying out an arrest and some jail time, those the agency doesn’t worry about. Minnesota’s taxpayers have it covered.
There are so many things wrong with this picture I can’t begin to identify them all.
In the umpteenth iteration of a jobless aid extension bill, one in which Democrats agreed to cut out more than $20 billion, an attempt to overcome the Republican-led filibuster failed last night on a vote of 56 to 40, four short of the required 60 votes.
As we reported yesterday in ‘Pseudo-economics Becomes Sado-economics’, the latest version of the bill (H.R. 4213) removed the program that provides an extra $25 per week to those receiving unemployment compensation.
Apparently taking $100 a month from jobless workers wasn’t enough to satisfy Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) who joined every voting Republican to continue to block the measure.
When the Senate passed a short-term, two-month extension of the federal unemployment benefit programs in April, Republican Senators George Voinovich (OH), Susan Collins (ME) and Olympia Snowe (ME) voted to pass that bill. Thus far, they have continued to vote “No” on the current measure that would extend eligibility through November.
I have been on the phone with Senate offices all morning, specifically with the offices of Lieberman, Nelson, Voinovich, Collins and Snowe. My message for them has been simple: Drop your support of this sadistic filibuster. And then I add a rather rhetorical question: If taking $25 a week away from jobless workers like myself wasn’t enough to get your vote, how much more pain do you want to inflict?
At any rate, my concern with the idea of raising the retirement age is twofold. One is the pretty obvious point that many jobs are a great deal more physically taxing than the job of the average economist or political pundit. But you could in principle handle this fairly and equitably through the Disability Insurance element of Social Security. The other issue is that as best I can tell from the labor market fate of people in the 50-65 age bracket, employers aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to hire older workers in any capacity.
He points to a Washington Independent piece by Annie Lowry that starts with something that will sound familiar to Main Street readers: “Too young not to work but too old to work?”
Last week, Ashley Keith told us about a Working America member who characterized herself as “too young to retire but too old to hire” and Susan Bruce pointed to rising suicide rates among baby boomers, while in the past Mitchell Hirsch looked closely at record levels of unemployment for older workers.
Lowry takes a look at the age discrimination component of older workers’ struggles.
McCann called age discrimination in hiring “the most under-reported form of discrimination” and “prevalent” throughout the recession, as an average of 5 workers compete for every job opening. In an interview, she explained why age discrimination is so hard to quantify: “[It is] the lack of proof. If you’re laid off, you might be in outplacement, and see that everyone who got laid off was older. Or, you might have friends in your office to tell you that a younger person took your job when your employer told you the position was being eliminated. But hiring discrimination is much harder to see, and can be impossible to prove. In most cases, you’re not going to know who was hired. You’re not going to know how they filled the position. There’s just a hunch, or a feeling, that you’re not getting through the door because of your age.”
Incidences of age discrimination in firing are much clearer to see, and have risen along with the recession. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says age discrimination cases have jumped 17 percent since the start of the recession, and climbed 30 percent between 2007 and 2008. But virtually all of those cases involve layoffs, rather than the lack of job offers.
Still, evidence of age bias in hiring is accumulating in academic research and anecdotal reports to the EEOC, Commission on Civil Rights and AARP. In one famed 2005 study, a Texas A&M economist sent out 4,000 job applications for entry-level positions. (The resumes were only women’s.) Older workers were 40 percent less likely to receive a response back. And of the letters sent to Congress last week, a vast majority mentioned age, many coming from older workers who had applied for hundreds of positions, to no avail.
What happens to all those people who’ve worked their whole lives if Congress doesn’t pass jobs legislation, keeps chipping away at the safety net for jobless workers, and then jacks up the retirement age?
One weird thing here—or a thing that shows how thoughtless and out of touch many politicians truly are, even with basic self interest—is that baby boomers vote at high rates. If Congress won’t take care of their interests, what hope do the rest of us have?
Within hours of losing an initial test vote yesterday on the bill that includes an extension of eligibility for federal unemployment benefit programs, Senate Democratic leaders presented yet another version in an effort to attract the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican-led filibuster.
According to a summary being circulated on Capitol Hill, the new version of H.R. 4213, the measure generically referred to as the ‘extenders’ bill, removes the extension of the Federal Additional Compensation (FAC) provision that has been adding $25 per week to jobless workers’ unemployment benefits. Those unemployed workers who have been receiving the extra $25 would continue to do so, but only through the end of the second week of December. Newly jobless workers eligible for state unemployment benefits as of June 1st would no longer qualify for the additional funds.
That’s $100 a month that those receiving jobless benefits would not have available to spend on the necessities of life. That’s also $100 a month that would no longer flow directly into the economy in communities across the country. And, for the average jobless worker receiving unemployment, it represents a 7.5% reduction in their already meager income.
The argument being made for this change is that it would reduce spending. Clearly, that’s the case. It would reduce spending by jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits.
Other changes to the bill reduce the Medicare physician payment update to 6 months from 19, and provide for some new exemptions from tax changes for certain partnership transactions as well as additional protections for some of the income of investment fund managers.
Consideration of the previous version was halted when a test vote failed 45 to 52. Eleven Senate Democrats, along with Joe Lieberman, joined all 40 voting Republicans to defeat a motion to wave the Budget Act on the measure. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) withdrew a cloture motion on that measure, and later filed another one for the newly revised version. That revision is being debated now in the Senate.
The Democrats voting with the Republicans were Bayh (IN), Landrieu (LA), Nelson (NE), Nelson (FL), McCaskill (MO), Feingold (WI), Kohl (WI), Begich (AK), Pryor (AR), Webb (VA) and Menendez (NJ).
Some of those votes, certainly, were made after it was already clear the motion would not pass. But politics doesn’t really account for what’s been going on of late in Congress. It’s something more ominous.
A significant minority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate have mindlessly been swayed by the siren song of the Republican-inspired chorus calling for immediate fiscal austerity, spending cuts and short-term deficit reduction.
Just look at what Congress has done in recent weeks. As Judy Conti and Andy Stettner of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) noted in an email today:
• They’ve let 900,000 workers run out of jobless benefits so far, and by the end of next week, that number will top 1 million.
• They’ve decided to let 145,000 unemployed workers each month lose out on subsidized health care coverage thru COBRA, thereby likely dooming them to becoming uninsured or very grossly under-insured
• They’ve decided to cut $25 per week from unemployment check, and remove $6 billion in crucial stimulus to communities throughout the country. This could result in job loss of up to 60,000 jobs before the year end, and in many Southern states in particular, where UI benefits are extremely low, it means over a 10% cut in UI checks for the unemployed.
• They’ve scaled back attempts to appropriately tax rich investment fund managers for the income they make.
• Oh yeah, they’ve also gone on a vacation and taken long weekends.
Initial state unemployment claims hit 472,000 last week, an increase of 12,000 from the previous week. Continuing state claims rose 88,000 for the week, to a total of 4,571,000. The national unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and last month’s private sector job growth was sluggish at best. 15 million American workers are unemployed — a number that has barely budged since last summer. Nearly half of jobless workers have been out of work for six months or more.
And the economy is not generating much real growth. Home construction and building permits are sagging once again.
Home builders are sending a message: They won’t be able to contribute much to the economic recovery now that government incentives have vanished.
House construction and applications for building permits sank in May, overshadowing favorable reports on manufacturing and wholesale inflation.
Fewer houses mean fewer jobs. Construction fuels a broad swath of industries across the economy. Yet double-digit unemployment is among the main reasons people have passed on buying new houses. Even with near-record-low mortgage rates, the industry is struggling.
Overall, new house and apartment construction fell 10 percent in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 593,000, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. April’s figure was revised downward to 659,000.
Applications for new building permits — a sign of future activity — sank 5.9 percent to an annual rate of 574,000, the lowest level in a year.
Despite the seriously troubling realities, many in Congress are marching obliviously down the road of short-term deficit reduction and fiscal austerity. Why? One reason is the conscious creation of an impression that this is what the vaunted conventional wisdom now demands. And seriously-mistaken economists along with self-aggrandizing media pundits are front and center in this effort.
One of the clearest examples was last week’s column by David Brooks in The New York Times. It’s titled ‘Prune and Grow’.
My first thought was, “Oh, I see; the economy is a shrub.” But it’s far worse. It’s pseudo-economics, albeit espoused by the self-appointed Dean of the School of Conventional Wisdom.
Voters, business leaders and political leaders do not seem to think that the stimulus was such a smashing success that we should do it again, even with today’s high unemployment.
They seem to see the fiscal floodgates wide open and that the private sector still only created a measly 41,000 jobs last month. That doesn’t inspire confidence. Furthermore, they understand something that is hard to quantify: Deficit spending in the middle of a debt crisis has different psychological effects than deficit spending at other times.
In times like these, deficit spending to pump up the economy doesn’t make consumers feel more confident; it makes them feel more insecure because they see a political system out of control. Deficit spending doesn’t induce small businesspeople to hire and expand.
Dean Baker, a real economist, had a field day with this piece, showing that Brooks is engaged in magical thinking, divorced from the real world.
His first invention is telling us: “deficit spending in the middle of a debt crisis has different psychological effects than deficit spending at other times.” This is very interesting, what “debt crisis” is Brooks referring to? We can point to a debt crisis in Greece, and arguably Portugal and Spain, but it is not clear what that has to do with the argument for stimulus in the United States. There were debt crises in Latin America in the 80s, no one ever raised these in the context of the Reagan era budget deficits.
In the real world we would look to things like the ratio of debt to GDP in the United States (@60 percent) and compare it to the ratios in other countries and to the U.S. at other points in time. There are several countries with debt to GDP ratios of far more than 100 percent who are able to borrow money with no difficulty. For example, Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of more than 110 percent yet it pays less than 1.5 percent interest on its long-term debt. Right after World War II the debt to GDP ratio in the United States was also over 110 percent, yet interest rates were low and the economy had decades of solid growth.
The next thing we would do in the real world is look at the interest rates that the United States is currently paying. At present the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is about 3.2 percent, near a post-World War II low. In short, the debt crisis is magic — an invention of David Brooks — not something that exists in the world.
But Brooks goes further, declaring:
So we are exiting a period of fiscal stimulus and entering a period of fiscal consolidation.
Done deal, game over, fait accompli. Why? Because Brooks says so, conveniently mapping short-term foreign debt problems onto the United States where, in fact, they don’t exist:
Last year, the finance ministers of the G-20 were all for pumping up economic activity. This year, they called on their members to reduce debt. In this country, deficits are now the top concern.
On his blog, Paul Krugman has been engaged in on ongoing discussion of the dangers of the fiscal austerity push. One of the points he makes is that, contrary to David Brooks’ assertions, with high unemployment there is no way that fiscal austerity can lead to economic growth unless you significantly reduce interest rates and drastically devalue your currency. The U.S. can do neither.
Worse, those calling for short-term spending cuts and fiscal austerity are also promoting raising interest rates. Once again, with unemployment near 10 percent, that is just insane. It’s pseudo-economics.
And yet, the Congress has begun to move in that direction.
In doing so, the likelihood of a double-dip recession increases dramatically. Without significant additional aid to state and local governments and school districts, hundreds of thousands of new layoffs are all but assured. Half a million temporary Census workers will have those jobs end this summer. A new 1937-style recessionary slide would throw even more workers out of their jobs.
Meanwhile, Congress has begun to reduce or eliminate portions of the unemployment safety net. Tens of millions of Americans are already sliding from the middle-class into poverty. The phony deficit hawks are doing the Republicans’ bidding. If the economy slides backward, they will blame the Democrats and attack even more jobless aid programs. I fear that, feeling their mean-spirited oats, they will soon target the added Tiers of emergency federal unemployment benefits.
This story in today’s NY Times is an exercise in creative writing. The headline is, “U.S. Consumer Prices Fall on Lower Energy Costs,” which only reflects a small portion of what is reported. Discouraging news is paired with not so bad or good news, in an attempt to minimize the reality of the recession/depression, and the very unpleasant facts are squirreled away at the end.
Consumer prices are falling due to decreasing energy costs:
Energy prices dropped 2.9 percent, the most in more than a year. Gasoline prices posted the biggest decline — down 5.2 percent in May, the sharpest decline since December 2008.
and
Food prices were flat in May, down from a 0.2 percent rise in April. Falling prices for fruits and vegetables swamped rising prices for meat, cereals and dairy products.
Apparently we are supposed to be so excited about lower prices for fruits and vegetables that we don’t notice that meat, cereal, and dairy costs are increasing. Or that wages are stagnant, so the lower prices aren’t making a huge difference in people’s wallets.
Halfway through the story we find the real meat:
In the report on jobless filings, the Labor Department said initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 472,000, the highest level in a month. Economists had expected claims would fall to a seasonally adjusted 450,000, according to Thomson Reuters.
and
The number of people continuing to claim benefits rose by 88,000 to 4.57 million. That does not include about 5.2 million people who receive extended benefits paid for by the federal government.
there’s more:
Adding to worries about the job market, the Labor Department said earlier this month that the economy generated only 41,000 private-sector jobs in May. That was down from 218,000 in April.
This kind of reporting is incredibly frustrating to read, and quite possibly designed to obscure the ugly realities of the employment situation:
More than 29 million Americans are still without work or forced into part-time work — that’s a real jobless rate of 16.6% (BLS U6). (Leo Hindery Jr.’s more precise estimate is 30.16 million for a jobless rate of 18.8 percent.) Nearly 7 million people have been jobless for over 26 weeks (the “long-term unemployed”) — more than at any time since the Great Depression. We still need more than 22 million new jobs to get us anywhere near full-employment.
There were many more stories in 2009 about the unemployed. Given that there are even more folks unemployed now, it’s sad to note that the coverage has largely dried up. No wonder Congress doesn’t seem to feel the urgency.
We need to push for the extended unemployments bill, and it sure would be nice to get some help to the folks who were never eligible for benefits but remain unemployed.
