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Economy added over 200,000 jobs last month

From BLS:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 204,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 7.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in leisure and hospitality, retail trade, professional and technical services, manufacturing, and health care.

Household Survey Data

Both the number of unemployed persons, at 11.3 million, and the unemployment rate, at 7.3 percent, changed little in October. Among the unemployed, however, the number who reported being on temporary layoff increased by 448,000. This figure includes furloughed federal employees who were classified as unemployed on temporary layoff under
the definitions used in the household survey. (Estimates of the unemployed by reason, such as temporary layoff and job leavers, do not sum to the official seasonally adjusted measure of total unemployed because they are independently seasonally adjusted.) For more
information on the classification of workers affected by the federal government shutdown, see the box note. (See tables A-1 and A-11.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.0 percent), adult women (6.4 percent), teenagers (22.2 percent), whites (6.3 percent), blacks (13.1 percent), and Hispanics (9.1 percent) showed little or no change in October. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 4.1 million in October. These individuals accounted for 36.1 percent of the unemployed. The number of long-term
unemployed has declined by 954,000 over the year. (See table A-12.)

By ecthompsonmd|2013-11-08T14:43:45-04:00November 8th, 2013|Economy|Comments Off

Mitt Romney lies – same as it ever was

(I wrote this for the Urban News several days ago. I wrote it before the vice presidential debate.)

One candidate’s views change with the wind

The new wave band, Talking Heads, had a song called “Once in a Lifetime.” There was a refrain in that song in which the lead singer, David Byrne, hauntingly sang, “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” As I watch the debates, I was thinking just that: “same as it ever was.”

Just a few months ago, I wrote a column for the Urban News that was entitled “Lies and More Lies,” in which I outlined Mitt Romney’s loose affiliation with the truth. I’m sure that President Obama as he stood at the lectern during the Wednesday night debate thought about saying, “I’ll start speaking when you say something that’s true.”

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that someone would stand up in front of the American people and tell not just one lie but, instead, a whole host of lies. In this article, I cannot recount all the lies that Mitt Romney told just in that 90-minute debate: the newspaper cannot give me enough space. But national fact checkers have come up with at least 27 separate instances where Mitt Romney simply did not tell the truth. Here are a few of them.

Romney stated he’s not going to raise taxes on middle-class families. Okay. Maybe he decided, just before he went on stage, that the tax plan on his own website was garbage and that, starting then, he would run on some other tax plan. Maybe that’s because the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center analyzed the one on his web site and said it cannot be balanced without raising taxes on the middle class. (more…)

By ecthompsonmd|2013-11-03T18:14:51-04:00October 12th, 2012|Economy, Elections, Obama administration, Party Politics, Taxes|Comments Off

Krugman – How to fix the economy

This is easy. He has been saying this for years. Fixing the economy – inject capital into state and local governments. Hire back the state and local workers. This would drop the unemployment rate and really get our economy moving in the right direction.

By ecthompsonmd|2012-05-08T00:51:08-04:00May 8th, 2012|Economy|Comments Off