Unemployment Gets Worse
So where is that stimulus blip? Oh right, the unions did pretty well with the whole GM fiasco, but what about the little guy? The ones that Obama claims to be the champion of?
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The battered U.S. labor market took a step backwards last month as employers trimmed more jobs from their payrolls in June, according to a government report Thursday.
There was a net loss of 467,000 jobs in June, compared with a revised loss of 322,000 jobs in May. This was the first time in four months that the number of jobs lost rose from the prior month.
The June job losses were also far worse than the forecast of a loss of 365,000 jobs by economists surveyed by Briefing.com.
The unemployment rate rose for the ninth straight month, climbing to 9.5% from 9.4%, and hitting another 26-year high. Economists had been expecting that the unemployment rate would hit 9.6%.
Nearly 3.4 million jobs have been lost during the first half of 2009, more than the 3.1 million lost in all of 2008.
“It’s not the catastrophic numbers we saw earlier this year, but they’re still pretty damn lousy,” said Keith Hembre, chief economist with First American Funds.
The job losses don’t tell the full picture of the pain the labor market either. The average hourly work week fell to 33 hours from 33.1 hours in May, a record low in readings that go back to 1964. Average hourly wages were unchanged, so the shorter week shaved $1.85, or 0.3%, off of the average weekly paycheck.
The so-called underemployment rate, which counts those who are working part-time jobs because they couldn’t find a full-time position as well as discouraged job seekers who have stopped looking for work, rose to a record high 16.5%.
Still feeling Hopeful? Is this the Change you wanted? Way to go Obama voters!
Hotair has more:
Clearly, the nation is heading in the wrong direction. There isn’t a single sign of job recovery in this latest report despite four months of Porkulus spending. Not one single sector except for government shows job growth, or even a hint of it.
Three months ago, Obama bragged that his stimulus had begun to create a “rush” to hire construction workers. Since then, the construction industry has lost over 120,000 jobs, and this month’s report shows that trend accelerating at a season when construction should normally be hiring.
Porkulus has utterly failed, as has the Obama administration’s fiscal policies. Businesses have conserved capital in the face of massive new taxes and costs associated with Obama’s stated fiscal policies, such as cap-and-trade, foreign-income taxation, and the higher interest rates that will spring from the massive deficits Obama plans to create. The capital necessary for growth won’t appear in the market under these conditions, as we have clearly seen. When will the media begin to hold this administration responsible for Obama’s economy-killing agenda?
They won’t, because all of this is obviously Bush’s fault right? And frankly, some of it is. But let’s not overlook the fact that Obama has bankrupted our great-grandchildren in his spending frenzy (that has done absolutely nothing for the average Joe), that is ALL Obama.
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