George Rebane
Just a couple of quick notes on some current and very important topics – the ongoing disaster of federal meddling in the markets, and how our systemic unemployment growth continues to be the biggest secret our ‘establishment’ (both parties) does not want to you to think about.
Remember Fisker, the battery-powered sportscar that was supposed to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well, that is the latest of the California-based, government propped and promoted green manufacturing enterprises to go into its death spiral. Oh, make no mistake that the entire thing can be resurrected as a zombie company with some billions pumped into it, but right now it’s looking for a “partner” while wandering around with a ‘Buy Me, please’ sign pinned to its backside.
What should make it doubly embarrassing, but doesn’t – progressives are never embarrassed when their central planning doesn’t pan out and costs the wealth generators more money – is that the $110K Fisker Karma didn’t even pass the Consumer Reports test procedures to be rated, and the supplier of its battery pack, government subsidized A123 Systems, couldn’t come up with its mandated revolutionary batteries, and is now itself “in the midst of a bankruptcy auction.” (more here)
But none of this makes no never-mind to those Beltway Buffoons who know better what we should buy and how we should live. This little item adds to the recorded torrent of such ongoing failures of approaching Soviet-era central planning.
America’s systemic unemployment growth continues unchecked and unreported. What is reported is that the economy continues to grow in its anemic way with another 146K jobs added in November (with downward revisions of 49K jobs for previous months). While outlets like the WSJ and zerohedge.com go through some of the numbers, even they don’t connect the important dots.
Last month's job numbers allow Team Obama to continue its national recovery bamboozle by citing that the official unemployment rate also dropped from 7.9% to 7.7%. This happened, not because of the dodgy new jobs number, but because another 350K+ workers just quit looking for work, raising the number of nonworkers in our workforce to 89.2M from 86.8M a year ago. Throw a brain cell on this, the fraction of people working in our available workforce has now fallen to 63.6%, down from 65.7% when the recession was supposed to have ended in June 2009.
What these percentages hide is the growth of the actual number unemployed. Remember that the worker demographic continued to grow at somewhere between 1.1% and 1.5% annually during that same interval while the participation rate dropped. People not arithmetically challenged know that this spikes the growth of non-workers who demand an ever higher redistribution of wealth. The 8dec12 WSJ reports “Welfare payments that redistribute income from workers to mostly nonworkers now exceed $1T a year.”
To tie in technology driven productivity growth, according to the Fed we are today producing a 48% higher real GDP ($13.8T) than we did in 1996 ($9.6T) with the same number of people employed (approximately 95M). Readers who do numbers can also take a look at some more strategic remarks I have made on this irreversible trend (here and here and here).
So what's the deal with totally misleading headlines like ‘Labor Market Plods Forward’ when it is actually falling further and further behind the amount of jobs needed to keep the country afloat? The long-term picture has no chance of getting better because none of the buffoons acknowledge the problem, let alone have a clue about a solution. ‘Full employment’ as we knew it is already a fading memory.
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