Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
Posts tagged Unemployment
The Slow, Agonizing Death Of The American Worker
16 days ago
Source: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
10 Amazing Charts That Demonstrate The Slow, Agonizing Death Of The American Worker
The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. In the old days, when the big corporations that dominate our society did well, that also meant good things for American workers since those corporations would need more of us to work for them. But in the emerging one world economic system that our economy is being merged into, those corporations have other choices now. For instance, the big corporations can now choose to limit the number of “expensive” American workers that they employ by shipping millions of jobs to the other side of the world. And from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They can make much bigger profits by hiring people on the other side of the planet to work for them for less than a dollar an hour. If they can get good production out of those people, then why should they hire Americans for ten to twenty times as much, plus have to give those Americans health insurance and other benefits?
Another major factor in the slow, agonizing death of the American worker is technology. We live during a period when technology is advancing at a pace that is almost unimaginable at the same time that it is steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper. That means that it is going to become easier and easier for companies to replace workers with robots and computers. As I have written about previously, it is being projected that our economy will lose millions of jobs to technology in the coming years. Yes, some of us will still be needed to help build the robots and the computers, but not all of us will. And of course the overall general weakness of the economy is not helping matters either. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in the period of steady economic decline that we are experiencing now.
America is simply not the economic powerhouse that it once was. Back in 2001, the U.S. economy accounted for 31.8 percent of global GDP. By 2011, the U.S. economy only accounted for 21.6 percent of global GDP. That is a collapse any way that you want to look at it.
Today, American workers are living in an economy that is rapidly declining, and their jobs are steadily being stolen by robots, computers and foreign workers that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Politicians from both political parties refuse to do anything to stop the bleeding because they think that the status quo is working just great.
So don’t expect things to get better any time soon.
The following are 10 amazing charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker…
#1 Wages And Salaries As A Percentage Of GDP
As you can see, wages as a percentage of GDP are hovering near an all-time record low. That means that American workers are bringing home a smaller share of the economic pie than ever before.
#2 Average Annual Hours Worked Per Employed Person In The United States
We are an economy that is rapidly trading good paying full-time jobs for low paying part-time jobs. The decline in average annual hours worked that we have witnessed represents the equivalent of losing millions of jobs. There has been an explosion of “the working poor” in the United States, and this trend is probably only going to accelerate in the years to come.
#3 Manufacturing Employment
As you can see, there are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then. The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001, and yet our politicians stand around and do nothing about it.
#4 Employment-Population Ratio
This is one of my favorite charts. It shows that there has been absolutely no employment recovery at all since the end of the last recession. The percentage of working age Americans that have a job has stayed under 59 percent for 44 months in a row. How much worse will things get when the next major economic downturn strikes?
#5 Labor Force Participation Rate
This is how the Obama administration is getting the “unemployment rate” to magically go down. They are pretending that millions upon millions of Americans simply do not want to work anymore. As you will notice, the decline of the labor force participation rate has accelerated greatly since Barack Obama entered the White House.
#6 Duration Of Unemployment
The average amount of time that it takes an unemployed worker to find a new job has declined slightly, but it is still far above normal historical levels. It is a crying shame that it takes the average unemployed worker two-thirds of a year to find a new job, but this is the new economic reality that we are all living in.
Has WWIII already begun? Gerald Celente breaks down the Past, Present, and Future
03 months ago
Gary Franchi and Next News Network interview Trends forecaster Gerald Celente covering our current condition and future paths. Topics discussed cover the economy, the power play behind ever expanding wars and the natural resources involved, Wall Street and the government blessing to the “too big to fail” organizations plus the recent gun control moves by the administration and the history behind it all.
Obamacare fee of $63 per person to be implemented in the new year
05 months ago
Source: http://www.naturalnews.com
By J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) Do you remember, at the height of the debate over the Affordable Care Act – the monstrosity that became known not so affectionately as “Obamacare” – when then-House Speaker Pelosi, D-Calif., took to the dais at the 2010 Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties with this outrageous statement: “…[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”
She was talking about a piece of legislation that numbered some 2,700 pages – a massive bill that most members of Congress admitted they had not read and would never read (though trust us when we tell you these same lawmakers already knew exactly what was in it).
Well, Pelosi must be feeling very relieved these days because now, at long last, Americans are finally getting to find out exactly what’s in the bill that she and others refused to discuss in detail prior to its passage.
‘So many new taxes and fees during a time of economic uncertainty’
What Americans will learn first and foremost is that Obamacare will be infinitely more expensive than they were told – costs all of us will be forced to bear, even if we vehemently opposed this blatant expansion of government power over an industry that amounts to about one-seventh of the U.S. economy.
Whether they are called “taxes” or “fees” or “regulatory costs,” Americans will be hit up six ways from Sunday for costs related to the law that President Obama, Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and everyone else who voted for it said would never pass to us.
One such fee-tax-regulatory cost is a $63-per-person stipend almost no one knew about that will help cover people who have preexisting conditions – a cost that, most likely, will be passed onto each insured person.
Again, you can thank President Obama’s healthcare “overhaul.”
The charge was, of course, buried in the recent regulation. It will work out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say.
In an interview with the Washington Times, employee benefits attorney Chantel Sheaks called it a “sleeper issue” that will have significant consequences, especially for the nation’s largest employers – all at a time when unemployment remains at historic highs.
“Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, [companies will] be hit with a multimillion-dollar assessment without getting anything back for it,” Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary, told the paper.
Based on figures contained within the regulation, some 190 million Americans on health plans for employers and individuals could wind up owing the per-person fee.
Obama administration officials say the previously undisclosed fee is only temporary, levied for three years beginning in 2014 and designed to raise $25 billion. The fee begins at $63 then falls.
Most of that money is expected to go into a fund that will be administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. Officials say it will be used to cushion health insurance companies from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering previously uninsured people who have preexisting medical problems. Beginning Jan. 1, 2014, insurers will be forbidden from turning away already-sick patients under Obamacare statutes.
Just the beginning
The initiative “is intended to help millions of Americans purchase affordable health insurance, reduce reimbursed usage of hospital and other medical facilities by the uninsured and thereby lower medical expenses and premiums for all,” the administration says in the regulation (Note: Insurance companies that are actually in the business of insuring people say rates are going to go up, not down – and could, in fact, double in the short term).
But here’s the kicker. The initial $25 billion hike is just the beginning, “part of a bigger package of taxes and fees to finance Mr. Obama’s expansion of coverage to the uninsured,” the Times said. Over the course of the next decade, the total tab is closer to $700 billion, though no one in the administration is talking about what this additional burden will do to a still-struggling economy.
What else is included? Higher Medicare taxes, beginning Jan. 1, on people who make more than $200,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000 (Obama, always the class warrior, once pledged not to raise any taxes on folks earning less than $250,000).
The thing that Americans need to know is that these initial Obamacare taxes and “fees” are just the beginning. Needless to say, we’ll be covering this issue closely.
Sources:
10 Signs We Live in a False Economy
15 months ago
Source: http://www.activistpost.com
Credit: http://www.economist.com/node/13527329
It’s time to admit that we live in a false economy. Smoke and mirrors are used to make us believe the economy is real, but it’s all an elaborate illusion.
Out of one side of the establishment’s mouth we hear excitement about “green shoots”, and out of the other side comes breathless warnings of fiscal cliffs and the urgent need for unlimited bailouts by the Fed.
We hear the people begging for jobs and the politicians promising them, but politicians can’t create jobs. We see people camped out to buy stuff on Black Friday indicating the consumer economy is seemingly thriving, only to find out everything was bought on credit.
The corporate media does their best to distract us from seeing anything real. We see the media glorify Kim Kardashian who got rich by being famous, and became famous merely by being rich. She got front page coverage on Huffington Post this week because her cat died. Enough said.
Meanwhile the financial media makes the economy seem complicated and they ban anyone who speaks truthfully about the economy from their airwaves.
Is it any wonder why people are angry and confused about the economy?
Well, hopefully these signs that we live in a false economy will help clear up some of that confusion.
US households already went off their fiscal cliff and breached their debt ceiling
15 months ago
in Finance, Unemployment
Source: http://www.blacklistednews.com
Few people realize that the debt ceiling is aligning right on track with the fiscal cliff. Total public outstanding debt is now at $16.369 trillion and is only $63 billion away from breaching the limit. Not a coincidence that the fiscal cliff is also on the horizon. In essence, we are addicted to debt. However US households have been on a multi-year long process of deleveraging yet this is not being asked from banks or governmental institutions. Of course we knew this was coming. Anyone that was honestly objective realized that we were on an unsustainable path. Yet the name of the game is now about kicking the can furiously down the road so it falls beyond or line of vision. Then we act surprised when we arrive at the can and it has only gotten heavier with debt. So as we are T-minus a few days from the fiscal cliff, let us examine the debt ceiling.
Debt ceiling being breached
We are fast approaching the debt ceiling:
As stated, we are $63 billion away from hitting this. This week another $26 billion will be added courtesy of a few auctions so we will hit this before the New Year. Debt has been expanding at a furious pace:
The ECB is facing similar issues and they are essentially rolling over debt like a giant snowball. The reality is, the only way out of these mountains of debt is through a slow methodical inflation. The Fed is not even shy about admitting this. Why else would they be digitally printing money with no fear? They realize the debt destruction of American households is enough to offset the trillions of extensions and side programs that are being offered to the banking system. But after years of this, we are now seeing spillover effects via housing bubbles, student loan bubbles, food price hikes, healthcare costs soaring, and other items of that nature all in line with stagnant incomes.
Fed Money Pumping Won’t Get What It Used To
05 months ago
Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com
Most people who pay attention to government stats are now wise to the fact that labor force data is just as important as the employment data in determining the unemployment rate. As pointed out by Santelli today, a few hundred thousand people were disappeared from the labor force to get the unemployment rate down below eight percent.
Even Reuters was forced to admit that the labor force decline was the real issue here. Although backers of the administration, predictably, are claiming that there’s momentum in the economy.
But just to get some perspective, let’s look at the government’s numbers on total payroll employment. The graph shows that with November’s numbers, employment is now back up 2006 levels. That is, we’re down 3.1 million jobs from the peak. Private-sector employment is even worse and is still at 2005 levels and is down 3.9 million from the peak. True, some people are leaving the work force as they retire, which means we now have more people on the dole. But even with retirees, we’re obviously not adding jobs for those entry-level people, which one can also guess from the massive employment among teenagers. One could also note that total private employment is barely above what it was back in 2000.
Robert Wenzel thinks the relatively positive numbers (in a short term analysis) reflect ongoing Fed pumping, and I agree with him, but even with QE3, we’re still looking at four to seven million unemployed people, and this also ignores the underemployed and those forced into part-time employment.
Colorado tax enforcer tells ’60 Minutes’: Weed beat the recession in Denver
07 months ago
Source: http://www.rawstory.com
By Stephen C. Webster
In a 13-minute segment broadcast Sunday night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” explored Colorado’s budding medical marijuana industry, and heard from a former drug cop turned tax enforcer who insisted that the industry has helped Denver beat the recession.
That runs contrary to President Barack Obama’s logic: he said in 2010 that legalizing marijuana is not “a good strategy to grow our economy.”
But the economic impact on Denver? According to Matt Cook, a former narcotics officer who oversees enforcement at the Colorado Department of Revenue, “it’s huge.”
Cook helped write the state’s medical marijuana law, and works as a consultant for medical marijuana businesses in the state. Speaking to “60 Minutes,” he said that the industry accounts for “over a million square feet of lease space in the Denver area.”
“Look at all the electrical contractors, HVAC contractors,” he said. “The number of ancillary businesses — it’s huge. Tax revenues exceeded, I believe the last number I heard was an excess of $20 million.”
While the state’s taxes on marijuana actually took in about $5 million during 2011, it certainly could spike as high or higher than Cook said: a recent study by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy found that legalized marijuana could pull in about $24 million in new revenue from an excise tax on marijuana production alone.
The report adds that state sales taxes on pot could generate up to $8.7 million more, with local governments seeing an additional $14.5 million just in the first year. Savings on enforcement and incarceration during that same period would also top more than $12 million, the group said.
(more…)
Legalized Plunder Of America
07 months ago
Source: http://rtr.org
“Legalized Plunder of the American People” – G. Edward Griffin
Published on Oct 2, 2012 by CaseyResearchFAN
To order the complete audio set from the Navigating the Politicized Economy Summit, available in CD and MP3 format, http://bit.ly/2012FallSummit
G. Edward Griffin discusses the Federal Reserve and it’s role in the declining economy at the recently concluded conference, Navigating the Politicized Economy.
To subscribe to the free Casey Daily Dispatch newsletter: http://bit.ly/Caseys_Daily.
This is a work in progess, a self learning tool and fun little project. Please excuse the slow development as it seems the needed proper time is always lacking. It is my hope that the combination of content and links to other sources of information in this simple blog may help awaken a few of the sleeping masses and encourage and inspire others to initiate their own research, ultimately for each person to be a light to help awaken others. Opinions expressed belong to me, myself and I. Also, a big thank you to all that take the time to visit, it is appreciated :)
