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Being unemployed for too long reportedly is driving people mad and costing taxpayers billions of dollars in mental illness and other disability claims. The New York Post reported Sunday that as unemployment checks run out, many jobless are trying to gain government benefits by declaring themselves unhealthy. More than 10.5 million people -- about 5.3 percent of the population aged 25 and 64 -- received disability checks in January from the federal government, the Post wrote, a 18 percent jump from before the recession. Among those claiming disability, 43 percent are asking for benefits because of mental illness, the Post...

The Obama administration has released an economic report that claims everything is coming up roses, and it is making the rounds of the MSM's news outlets. Truth is, when you look into the numbers, it's rather easy to come to the conclusion that the economic reports are as screwy as the administration's employment numbers. In order to convince Americans that his economic measures are working, Obama is claiming there has been an increase in retail sales from December to January by a seasonally adjusted .4%. The administration goes on to explain that while the economy is moving in a positive...

After three years with unemployment topping 8 percent, the U.S. has seen the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression, the Congressional Budget Office noted in a report issued today. And, despite some recent good news on the economic front, the CBO is still predicting that unemployment will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The report also notes that, including those who haven't sought work in the past four weeks and those who are working part-time but seeking full-time employment, the unemployment rate would be 15 percent.

Unemployed Americans who started businesses last year was the lowest in at least a quarter-century. In 2011, 3.3% of out-of-work Americans started businesses, compared to 4.7% in 2010. But recent start-up activity is anemic compared to 1989 when 20.3% of unemployed were starting businesses. Until 1997, start-up activity was typically in double digits. “Basically, it was not a very inviting environment for would-be entrepreneurs,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “While big business definitely began to reap the benefits of the recovery in 2011, conditions were not nearly as fruitful for existing small business, let along...

Gallup polled small-business owners (value under $20M) about their expansion plans in early January, which for some strange reason didn’t get reported until today. Among those who do not plan to hire — 85% of the entire sample — almost half of all such businesses cited expected costs from health care coverage and government regulation: U.S. small-business owners who aren’t hiring — 85% of those surveyed — are most likely to say the reasons they are not doing so include not needing additional employees; worries about weak business conditions, including revenues; cash flow; and the overall U.S. economy. Additionally, nearly...

The topic of BLS propaganda seasonal adjustments has been discussed extensively here especially in light of January's NFP beat. We'll leave it at that. However, we were rather surprised to note that the Census Bureau may have also ramped up its seasonal adjustment "fudge factoring" because when looking at the January headline retail sales data, which naturally was a smoothly continuous line on a Seasonally Adjusted basis, rising from $399.9 billion in December to $401.4 billion in January, something rather odd happened in the Unadjusted data set: the plunge from $459.8 billion in December to $361.4 billion in January, or...

When Barack Obama entered office in January, 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7%, meaning nearly two-thirds of working age Americans were working or looking for work. When the recession supposedly officially ended in June, 2009, the labor force participation rate was still 65.7%. In the latest, much celebrated, unemployment report, the labor force participation rate had plummeted to 63.7%, the most rapid decline in U.S. history. That means that under President Obama nearly 5 million Americans have fled the workforce in hopeless despair. The trick is that when those 5 million are not counted as in the work...

Worth watching.... and thinking about. But do so soon, because if we don't the system will collapse, and then there will be no benefits at all. Bill puts into graphs in a couple of minutes what I've been writing about for the last five years. Your choice is to either act on it or go to the store, right now, and buy all the vasoline you can find -- because if you don't act you're going to need it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u24nH03NccI&feature=player_embedded#!

PepsiCo just announced earnings, and proposed a devastating strategy outlook for both the company and its employees. It announced that it will cut about 3% of its workforce, or 8,700 employees.

President Obama last week brandished new jobs numbers as proof that his policies were having an effect on the unemployment rate, which the report said declined to 8.3 percent in January. The president is right about one thing: his big government agenda and class warfare tactics are having an effect -- but it's not the one he claims. In truth, last month's drop in the unemployment statistic was due largely to the evaporation of 1.2 million people from the labor force number. When people become so discouraged they stop actively looking for work, they are no longer counted as unemployed...

<p>As searches dragged on, many just stopped looking. Now they aren’t even counted among the jobless.</p> <p>Jackson Julien looked for a fun job, then for anything. Finally, demoralization set in.</p> <p>Millions of Americans have vanished from the US labor force in the past three years, many of them so discouraged by long, fruitless job searches that they have given up looking for work, convinced that no employer wants them, according to a new study.</p>

If you are keeping score at home it’s Chrysler $12.5 billion, NBC $12 million, with a taxpayer loss of $133 billion. Oh, and the city of Detroit is just minutes away, literally, from being more broke than Greece. Look, I’m a sucker for marketing as much as the next guy, but I have a lot of friends who were rightly outraged by Chrysler’s political ad for the auto bailout that starred Clint Eastwood and aired at halftime on NBC during the Super Bowl. It was more than just the subverted boosterism for Obama that was outrageous. There were many levels...

The U.S. economy produced another solid month of job gains in January, offering a hopeful sign for hiring in the year ahead. Employers added a net 243,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s higher than December, when employers added a net 200,000 jobs, and it marked the seventh straight month in which at least 100,000 jobs were created. That hasn't happened since 2005. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent in January from 8.5 percent in the prior month. The unemployment rate has fallen for the past five months and is now at its lowest level...

It appears the record surge in people not in the labor force is not the only outlier in today's data. For the other one we go to the Household Data Survey (Table 9), and specifically the breakdown between Full Time and Part Time Workers (defined as those "who usually work less than 35 hours per week"). We won't spend too much time on it, as it is self-explanatory. In January, the number of Part Time workers rose by 699K, the most ever, from 27,040K to 27,739K, the third highest number in the history of this series. How about Full time...

US businesses cranked up hiring in January in a burst of job growth that pulled the US unemployment rate down to 8.3 percent, nearly a three-year low, official data showed Friday. But Matt McDonald at Hamilton Place Strategies said the decline in the labor force participation rate, to 63.7 percent from 64 percent in December, was a worrying sign that people are still dropping out of the workforce. "If that full participation rate is the goal, our economy is 'missing' 3.8 million workers," McDonald said. The blockbuster jobs report blew past expectations, providing a shot of good news for President...

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3...

Energy: Small- and medium-size businesses serving Louisiana's energy industry are shedding employees, dipping into personal savings or moving elsewhere to stay afloat. The administration's war on fossil fuels is taking its toll. The federal six-month moratorium on drilling that was issued in May 2010, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has been officially lifted, but it might as well still be in effect. The glacial permitting process put in place in the aftermath in the name of public safety is killing an industry pledged to wean us from the "energy of the past" will not mourn. A...

REPORT: Prepare For A Giant New Wave Of US Bank Failures Luke McKenna Febuary 1, 2012Forget Europe — the weak U.S. recovery puts more than 750 domestic banks at risk of failure, according to a report from Invictus Consulting Group (via Business Wire). Invictus, which stress tested all FDIC-insured banks, says 758 lenders could collapse in the next three years, forecasting a new wave of borrower defaults in the absence of a strong economic up-tick. A disaster in Europe would probably make things much worse. Invictus says the at-risk lenders — mostly regional banks or subsidiaries of the majors —...

CBO: Taxes Will ‘Shoot Up by More Than 30 Percent’ Over Next 2 Years By Terence P. Jeffrey January 31, 2012 (CNSNews.com) - The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published today by the CBO. At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes. “In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent,” said CBO, “mostly because of...

Editor's note: This piece was authored by Brion McClanahan. In case you missed it, and many did, President Barack Obama gave his annual “State of the Union” address last night. All the pageantry, the pomp…the demagoguery, what’s not to watch? In light of President Obama’s promises and agenda, perhaps it would be useful to analyze his address through the lens of the founding generation. After all, they wrote and ratified the Constitution, so they should have a fair understanding about its meaning, powers, and how it should be interpreted. Obama: “Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward,...

There are a 154 million workers in the U.S., and the current 8.5%, unemployment rate means about 13.1 million Americans are still out of work. A new report commissioned by the United States Council for Mayors and prepared by IHS Global Insight shows that only 26 of 363 metropolitan statistical areas have completely recovered the jobs they lost during the recession. We drew on the report to show the number of jobs these metros lost during the recession, their pre-recession peak level, and the metro area's employment level as a share of overall state employment. Note: The “pre-recession peak” date...

The Obama administration is expected to reject the controversial Keystone Pipeline this afternoon, according to Fox News. The State Department is expected to vote against the pipeline this afternoon. Transcanada will however be allowed to reapply with an alternate route going through Nebraska. The administration will be unlikely to approve the pipeline under the timeline for the payroll tax cut extension law which requires a decision by February 21 The project has been extremely controversial for two main reasons. Those in favor of the pipeline point to the 8.5% unemployment rate, and point out that the pipeline could create much-needed...

Beware of bubbles of false hope. Right now there is a lot of talk about how the U.S. economy is improving, but it is all a lie. The mainstream media can be very seductive. When you sit down to watch television your brain tends to go into a very relaxed mode. In such a state, it becomes easy to slip thoughts and ideas past your defenses. Sometimes when I am watching television I realize what the media is trying to do and yet I can still feel it happening to me. In this day and age, it is absolutely...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I don't know that you've seen any of this in the Drive-By Media. I don't know on television if you've seen it. Have you seen it, Snerdley? Have you seen any reports on the unemployment news? Well, it's amazing here. "The number of Americans applying for first-time jobless benefits rose last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, reversing a recent decline and suggesting the labor market remained brittle. ... Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to 399,000 in the first week of 2012, the highest in six weeks, from an upwardly revised 375,000 a week earlier....

Danish wind turbine maker Vestas will cut 2,335 jobs in a bid to restore profitability after rising costs wiped out its 2011 earnings. Vestas Wind Systems A/S said the cuts, about a tenth of its workforce, would help it reduce costs by more than 150 million euros ($190.3 million) by year-end. Another 1,600 jobs could go at U.S. plants if a tax credit for renewable energy is not extended. The world's biggest wind turbine maker is battling fierce competition, including from Chinese rivals , as well as the threat of subsidy cuts for renewable energy by hard-pressed governments forced to...

<p>WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - The number of Americans applying for first-time jobless benefits rose last week, a report showed on Thursday, reversing a recent decline and suggesting the labor market remains brittle. Unemployment claims jumped to 399,000 in the first week of 2012, the highest in six weeks, from an upwardly revised 375,000 in the prior week. The four-week average of claims also marched higher to 381,750 from 374,000. The Labor Department report also showed 3.63 million continuing claims, up from 3.61 million. Including the millions of workers receiving benefits under emergency federal programs, some 7.3 million Americans were receiving unemployment benefits as of Dec. 24, the most recent date for which comprehensive figures are available. The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen sharply in recent months and was 8.5 percent December, but some economists worry the drop has been due in part to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force.</p>

To All My Valued Employees, There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country. Of course, as your employer, I am forbidden to tell you whom to vote for - it is against the law to discriminate based on political affiliation, race, creed, religion, etc. Please vote...

The stock market's forward looking economic prediction for the next six to nine months of 2012, in one picture. Commentary from today's picture: Between 9 December 2011 and 9 January 2011, the expected future for S&P 500 dividend payments have essentially "flatlined". This repeats the year-end pattern we saw in 2010. In early 2011, the U.S. economy slowed down into what we describe as a "microrecession", characterized by very low economic growth rates, which lasted through 2011Q3. The U.S. didn't leave those economic doldrums until the fourth quarter of 2011. Is this a signal that forward looking investors believe the...

<p>This seems like a really bad idea to me. Talk about crony capitalism. Individual buyers will be shut out from buying these properties.</p>

Obama recently signed a mysterious new law that proclaims all American soil is a "battleground," thereby allowing the president to indefinitely detain any American citizen without charges. Critics fear Obama will use his fun new unconstitutional powers to make his political enemies disappear, but that may not be necessary. The way things are going, most patriotic Americans will soon be six feet under, felled by apoplectic strokes brought on by reading the latest outrage committed by our "Commander in Chief." He may not have a limit to what he'll inflict; but our collective blood pressure may have a limit to...

At 15, Jarvis Nelson should be in high school and even thinking about college. Yet Jarvis is in seventh grade, and doesn’t know where he’ll go to high school — or even where he will be living — when he graduates from junior high, hopefully next year. That’s because Jarvis has attended three different schools in the past four months. He’s lived in three different places on the North and South Sides of the city — including his most recent home, a temporary shelter in Lake View. Jarvis, like thousands of other students in Chicago Public Schools, is homeless. He...

CINCINNATI (AP) — Macy's Inc. says it will close five Macy's and four Bloomingdale's stores that are underperforming. Clearance sales will begin at the stores Sunday and run for 10 weeks. More than 830 workers will be affected by the closings — 375 at Macy's stores and 463 at Bloomingdale's. But many may have the option of taking jobs at new stores the company plans to open. The closing Macy's stores are in Topeka, Kan.; Laurel, Md.; Parma, Ohio; Antioch, Tenn.; and Texas City, Texas. The Bloomingdale's closures are in Atlanta; Oak Brook, Ill.; North Bethesda, Md.; and in the...

Growing numbers of New Yorkers seeking food stamps have created an unwelcome spillover effect at some of New York City's job centers: overcrowding that in some cases has grown so severe, benefits were jeopardized. The crush of people grew so large at one Brooklyn center in November that the Fire Department intervened and prevented anyone from entering the building.

HONOLULU (AP) — With an eye on the 2012 campaign, President Barack Obama is wrapping up a low-key Hawaiian vacation and planning to quickly get back in front of voters as he ratchets up his bid for re-election. The president and his family are scheduled to leave the island of Oahu Monday evening after a 10-day vacation. Air Force One will touch down in Washington Tuesday morning, just hours before Republican presidential candidates square off in the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest of the 2012 campaign. After more than a week out of the spotlight, Obama plans to make...

Our US economy is fast falling into a third world economy according to Paul Craig Roberts, former Reagan administration official. “Americans have been betrayed by their government,” he recently told a Georgia television audience when asked if the fault all lies with China. When the politicians of both parties told us we’d have a new economy with new products available and new types of jobs, basically Roberts is saying we were sold a false bill of goods. Unless decisive action is taken immediately, he is warning that a demise of the US economy will feature only domestic services and other...

"Let's be real clear. Let's be real clear. President Barack Obama came out to Iowa three years ago, and he talked to you about hope and change. Well, let me tell you, after three years of Obama, we are hopeless and changeless, and we need Mitt Romney to bring us back, to bring America back," Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said in Iowa today at a Romney rally. * At the end of the video, while Christie is introducing Romney, an "Occupy" protester starts to chant "You are the 1%" as she is escorted off the premises. The heckler also trips...

Leaving behind a year of bruising legislative battles, President Barack Obama enters his fourth year in office having calculated that he no longer needs Congress to promote his agenda and may even benefit in his re-election campaign if lawmakers take little action in 2012. Devoid of any major policy pushes, much of the year will instead focus on the biggest goal of all: winning a second term. The president will keep up a robust domestic travel schedule and aggressive campaign fundraising and use executive action to try to boost the economy. Unlike the partisan, down-to-the-wire fights over allowing the nation...

It’s a great time to buy a television, and Ram Lall, a television salesman, isn’t happy about it. In a basement showroom of J&R, the huge electronics store in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Lall says the days of making big money from televisions are in the past. Pointing to a top-of-the line, 55-inch Sony television, Mr. Lall said it would have sold for $6,000 a few years ago. The current price? $2,599. “We are making less money because the company is forcing us to slash prices,” ..Televisions have become so inexpensive that the profits have largely been squeezed out of them,...

The assumption among the majority of Americans is that the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency will maintain America’s political, financial and economic hegemony around the world for decades to come. But, if there’s one lesson to be taken from economic history, it’s that no currency survives the test of time. As the economic crisis continued to deepen and affect nearly every nation on earth, many world leaders – from Europe to China – began discussing the replacement of the US dollar as the world’s monetary unit of trade. Dismissed by some as all talk, it should now be...

U.S. home prices fell in most major cities for the second straight month, further evidence that the housing recovery will be bumpy. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index shows prices dropped in October from September in 19 of the 20 cities tracked. Prices in a majority of cities declined for the second straight month.

Sears Holdings Corp. said Tuesday it will close 100 to 120 of its full-line Sears and Kmart stores as it struggles to attract shoppers. Sales for the fourth quarter are off a disappointing 5.2 percent compared with last year. “Given our performance and the difficult economic environment, especially for big-ticket items, we intend to implement a series of actions to reduce on-going expenses, adjust our asset base, and accelerate the transformation of our business model. These actions will better enable us to focus our investments on serving our customers and members through integrated retail – at the store, online and...

“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” President Obama, September 12, 2008 Beginning January 1, 2013, ObamaCare imposes a 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income of “high-income” taxpayers which could apply to proceeds from the sale of single family homes, townhouses, co-ops, condominiums, and even rental income, depending on your individual circumstances and any capital gains tax exclusions. Importantly, the “high income” thresholds are not...

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families. "Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses,...

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree. You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global's Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. In the president's view, extending the payroll tax cuts...

President Obama has warned Republicans he'll veto an extension of the payroll tax if it includes a measure forcing quick approval of the Keystone oil sands pipeline. “Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut I will reject,” Obama told reporters Wednesday after meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the White House. Obama said he would not accept a payroll tax holiday bill if Republicans add “extraneous” provisions, including a measure that would force quick approval of the controversial Keystone pipeline that would run from Canada to the southern U.S. House Republicans pushing for...

WASHINGTON -- Mark Twain, who took a dim view of our elected officials, once said that in the world of politics and government there were lies, damned lies and statistics. The headlines that followed Friday's report said that the number of unemployed Americans had fallen. But the fine print beneath that statistic revealed that this decline was owing largely to the 315,000 discouraged job seekers who stopped looking for work last month and thus were no longer counted among the unemployed. When you deduct these frustrated, long-term jobless Americans from the labor pool equation, guess what? The unemployment rate falls....

President Barack Obama on Tuesday laid out his economic philosophy, saying that banks, businesses and government must help the middle class get back on its feet. “This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class,” Obama said in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. The town, about 60 miles southwest of Kansas City, was chosen for the speech because President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a famous economic address calling for economic regulation social justice in Osawatomie in 1910, according to the White House. Read Roosevelt’s speech. Obama blamed the financial crisis and...

Citigroup Inc (C.N) is cutting 4,500 staff positions worldwide and the bank expects to record a $400 million charge related to the job cuts, Chief Executive Vikram Pandit said on Tuesday. Pandit, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference, said the bank's expense reduction plan generated $1.4 billion in savings so far this year, nearly 4 percent of the bank's $37.72 billion of operating expenses in the first three quarters.

The official unemployment rate fell by an impressive (and statistically significant) 0.4 last month, from 9.0 percent in October to 8.6 percent in November. 8.6 percent is the lowest rate since March 2009. "Signs of Hope," cheered the New York Times. The Washington Post said that economists "liked what they saw." (But not all economists.) Was the unemployment decline really good news, or was it bad news disguised as good? Let's start with jobs. Payroll employment rose only modestly in November, by 120,000. The payroll data, collected from employers, have monthly sampling error of about 100,000, so the November gain...

The U.S. Federal Reserve, acting with five other central banks, took steps Wednesday to boost the troubled global financial system by making it cheaper for banks to trade in U.S. dollars. The Fed -- along with central banks of the eurozone, England, Japan, Switzerland and Canada -- announced a coordinated plan to lower prices on dollar liquidity swaps beginning on December 5, and extending these swap arrangements to February 1, 2013.