Profits Rise, but Unemployed Ranks Don’t Shrink

And the HITS just keep on coming.....

The numbers tell the tale....the economy has shedded jobs and regardless of what the present Adminstration says, things have NOT gotten any better after trillions of dollars spent in "pet projects" for the DEMS and all their buddies. The recent numbers stated that the economy added 54000 jobs last month - over half of that increase was from one company, McDonalds.

The net effect of the stimulus is ZERO.....the number of people employed is flat which basically means if you fell out of work, you went on unemployment but then went off unemployment and weren't counted any more.... Unemployment is at 9.1% and not going anywhere but slightly up...

This is especially true for those who are in the 50+ age range....why pay for the experience and knowledge of a worker who has been doing the job for 20 years if you can bring in a few youngsters for half as much??

This doesn't seem to upset the President as he feels he is worthy of a 2nd term....the millions of people who lost homes and jobs over the last two+ years might feel differently along with all the families who have to pay for oil & gas at almost double what is was when the feckless idiot took on the Presidency...

Look at the basic state of the economy and make your own call....If the Head executive of your company ran your company as the President operates, how long before he would be sent packing???

" Profits Rise, but Unemployed Ranks Don’t Shrink " - Say no more as that headline says it all.


Number of the Week: Profits Rise, but Unemployed Ranks Don’t Shrink
By Mark Whitehouse - Wall Street Journal

58.4%: Percentage of U.S. population employed

Nearly two years into the economic recovery, the U.S. has made troublingly little headway in putting people back to work. If the animal spirits needed to create jobs don’t return, the country could soon be facing a renewed crisis.

Even as private businesses have added hundreds of thousands of jobs, the percentage of the population gainfully employed has hardly budged. As of May, it stood at 58.4%, a percentage point lower than at the bottom of the recession in mid-2009. That compares to a peak of 62.7% in December 2007.

The discrepancy reflects a number of problematic trends. The average rate of job creation in recent months isn’t much more that what’s needed to offset population growth. A lot of people have given up on finding jobs, and so aren’t included in the official count of the unemployed. The aging of the population also means more old folks out of the work force.

This isn’t a problem only for people without jobs. The smaller the share of the population employed, the smaller the economy’s potential to lift living standards through productivity gains. Indeed, productivity — companies’ ability to keep squeezing more production out of each hour worked — is transformed from the prime driver of prosperity into a force keeping people out of work. Profits rise, but the ranks of the unemployed don’t shrink.

If companies don’t start hiring more and soon, how do we get out of this? The economist’s traditional toolkit has little to offer beyond the advice of John Maynard Keynes: Use government spending to get people back to work. Despite the political opposition to stimulus, we could be back at a point where it’s worth trying — but it wouldn’t be advisable until or unless the government comes up with a plan to get its long-term finances in order.

The work of another dead economist, David Ricardo, suggests tax breaks won’t help much. In a world where people know the government will ultimately have to raise taxes to pay its debts, they aren’t likely to spend much of the windfall. Here, too, getting the government’s long-term debt under control is a prerequisite.

Here’s hoping we’ll have the political will to do what it takes.