President Obama Promised Help “Immediately”
July 17, 2009 / 12:31 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierHow immediate is immediately?
Four months later……
And what little stimulus money that has been spent (more on that at the end) has gone to keeping government bureaucrats in their cozy little jobs doing much of nothing. The private sector (where the vast majority of us work) is the one taking the pounding here.
I posted a sample of state unemployment yesterday, showing the spread of unemployment like a cancer across the nation. Today we can add historic unemployment in Kentucky, Idaho and Illinois. Is the stimulus package working? Of course not! The money is not getting out of the lethargic and bloated federal bureaucracy. The latest numbers on the 6 federal organizations I have been tracking is as abysmal as it has been for the last 5 months since the liberal stimulus-pork experiment was rammed through Congress. Here are the charts as of last week (July 10th, 2009).
And MaxedOutMama, my favorite economist says:
So we could be seeing a knock-on effect from the depressed manufacturing areas. It’s hard to know. It’s also possible that the auto parts dealers followed the regular shutdown schedule. My impression based on some of the county data is that we are moving into the scorched-earth cycle for the more depressed areas in which small businesses start shedding employees or shutting down, and small retail mostly gives up the ghost.
I hope I’m wrong, but I have unemployment heading to around 11% in 2010.
There is another problem with seasonal adjustments in times of rapid economic change. Conceptually, closing of school systems or the closing of auto plants has a set effect on jobs related to the actual number of those jobs, and if claims are high from other layoffs, the Seasonal Factor (because it is expressed as a percent of the whole) may either under or over correct. This problem is kind of blatantly obvious in continuing claims this week, which are reported to have dropped 642,000, when in actuality they rose close to 64,000.
Yeah. Not too immediate.
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