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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.

President Obama released his FY 2013 budget [Monday] morning. By his own numbers, his budget raises net taxes over the next decade by $1.56 trillion (Table S-9, page 225). As a percentage of the economy, tax revenues would rise all the way to 20.1% of GDP in 2022, far higher than the historical tax revenue average of 18.3% of GDP (Table S-1, page 205). Here are some of the tax lowlights: All 20 of the new or higher taxes in Obamacare are assumed to take place. That means that there will be a 3.8 percentage point surtax on investment income....

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...

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>

The American public's dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative think tank's annual Index of Dependence on Government tracks money spent on housing, health, welfare, education subsidies and other federal programs that were "traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families." The increase under Obama is the biggest two-year jump since Jimmy Carter was president, the data show. The rise was driven mainly by increases in housing subsidies, an...

Some issues fade; others fester. The Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate for religious charities, hospitals and universities is the festering kind. The initial reaction concerned the rights of institutions. Catholic organizations naturally resent being forced to buy health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and drugs that can end a pregnancy soon after conception. The Obama administration seems to have calculated that, since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated. But religious liberty is also popular, given the Constitution and all that.

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...

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...

Obama-backed electric car battery-maker files for bankruptcy By Andrew Restuccia - 01/26/12 11:55 AM ET An Indiana-based energy-storage company, whose subsidiary received a $118.5 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department, filed for bankruptcy Thursday. Ener1 is asking a federal bankruptcy court in New York to approve a plan to restructure the company’s debt and infuse $81 million in equity funding. “This was a difficult, but necessary, decision for our company,” Ener1 CEO Alex Sorokin said in a news release. “We are extremely pleased to have the strong support of our primary investors and lenders to substantially reduce the company’s...

This morning, Rep. Jan Schakowsky appeared on the Don Wade and Roma show on WLS-AM Chicago to comment on President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Schakowsky praised the president’s green energy initiatives, claiming that the (recalled) Chevy Volt “is doing pretty well” and defending Obama’s failed investment in Solyndra. When the hosts asked her to defend President Obama’s decision to block the development of the Keystone pipeline, Schakowsky did not dispute that the project would create jobs, but denied that these jobs were significant: "Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs and investing in green technologies...

Trying to jump-start his re-election with hometown fund-raisers and rallies, President Barack Obama told 500 cheering fans Wednesday, “Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election.” He repeated the message at more intimate gatherings in private homes in Lake View and Kenwood. He fired up the troops in his very first visit to his national headquarters in the Prudential Building. And he even stopped in to his own home for 20 minutes at the end of the night before flying back to Washington, D.C. He hopes the fund-raisers bring in more than $2 million for what...

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...

An unbylined item appearing at the Associated Press shortly after midnight (captured in full as a graphic here due to its brevity; for fair use and discussion purposes) crowed about how President Barack Obama "is looking to boost summer job prospects for kids," has "gotten commitments for nearly 180,000 youth employment opportunities for next summer," and only says that "Many of the positions would be unpaid training opportunities." How many? Well, most, according to the Hill's Eric Wasson: Obama to launch summer-jobs initiative President Obama on Thursday will unveil a summer-jobs initiative that the White House says is already on...

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.

Drive through New Hampshire in the next week, and you will see a staggering number of Republican yard signs. They’re everywhere: It seems like every third house has a sign up. They’re on front yards and in the windows of businesses. They’re in every neighborhood representing every demographic. They’re in front of homes along rural roadways, in front of suburban homes in the big southern towns, and in the conservative blue-collar neighborhoods of Manchester. And there are even Republican yard signs all over the capital city of Concord — a largely Democratic-leaning town in this swing state.Barack Obama is in...

Embattled PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is considering laying off roughly 4,000 workers and ending the company’s 401(k) match in order to boost earnings, The Post has learned. A final decision could be made in days, according to sources close to the situation. “They are burning the furniture” is how one source described the proposed actions, referring to quick-strike actions undertaken after the usual means of accomplishing the goal of increasing profits have failed. Nooyi has been testing the patience of company directors who are fretting over the lack of a clear heir apparent, a series of marketing missteps and a...

President Obama will challenge Senate Republican foes of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by naming Richard Cordray as its director while Congress is out of town, according to a senior administration official. Testifying before Congress in September, Mr. Cordray said he would make judicious use of lawsuits to enforce financial regulations. That would allow the agency to establish new regulations over financial institutions, putting into effect elements of the financial regulatory overhaul that was one of the administration’s main achievements in Congress. Mr. Obama’s exercise of constitutional powers to name top officials without Senate confirmation while Congress is...

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) -- Daniel Bradshaw, a young barber at Platinum Kutz in central Des Moines, hovers over a customer's half-trimmed head, clippers in hand, talking about the good old days of 2008. "Yeah, I was all for Obama. He was the man!" proclaimed Bradshaw, 32, whose friends call him "Mr. Puerto Rico" and whose colleagues sometimes refer to him as "Mr. Steal-Your-Client." As he brushed the hair clippings off his apron, he goes on: "I even got to meet him, once. He was all that." Or so he thought. Bradshaw, like many of his fellow Democrats, feels let...

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...

Real estate agents are famous for putting a listing in the best possible light to close a sale. On Thursday, the industry's national trade association confirmed that its monthly data have been painting a rosier picture of the pace of home sales since 2007. As msnbc.com reported in March, the National Association of Realtors has been overstating the pace of existing home sales by more than 16 percent. The trade group now says just 17.7 million existing homes were sold from 2007 to 2010, not the 20.6 million it originally reported. The NAR made no changes to its data on...

“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...

And Obama again proves that only gullible, stupid people vote for him. [VIDEO AT SITE] Posted on the pomposity that is the site of the "Office of the President Elect" it says this: Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack...

It's been 30 years since gasoline took such a big bite out of the family budget. When the gifts from Grandma are unloaded and holiday travel is over, the typical American household will have spent $4,155 filling up this year, a record. That is 8.4 percent of what the median family takes in, the highest share since 1981. Gas averaged more than $3.50 a gallon this year, another unfortunate record. And next year isn't likely to bring relief. In the past, high gas prices in the United States have gone hand-in-hand with economic good times, making them less damaging to...

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,...

President Obama’s uphill battle to re-election is getting steeper. A report released today by the centrist think-tank Third Way showed that more than 825,000 voters in eight key battleground states have fled the Democratic Party since Obama won election in 2008. “The numbers show that Democrats’ path to victory just got harder,” said Lanae Erickson, the report’s co-author. “We are seeing both an increase in independents and a decrease in Democrats and that means the coalition they have to assemble is going to rely even more on independents in 2012 than it did in 2008.” Amid frustrating partisan gridlock and...

Small businesses that are important to the safety and security of the nation are being gravely threatened by deep defense spending cuts. The NAVSYS Corporation is a small business in Colorado that developed the first GPS cell phone to provide the 911 cellular location services that exist today. That first cell phone will soon be displayed in the Smithsonian. NAVSYS has gone on to create other innovations, and many of its products play an important role in America’s defense technologies. On Monday, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R–WA) hosted a panel featuring female Representatives, CEOs, and small-business owners. Dr. Allison Brown,...

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....

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.

President Obama's campaign is rounding up an army of female activists to rekindle the enthusiasm among women that helped propel Obama to victory in 2008 and may be even more vital to his re-election in 2012. Obama's campaign this week started "Women for Obama," an initiative led by first lady Michelle Obama that is enlisting female voters to serve as campaign surrogates at dozens of house parties and phone banks across the nation. Obama badly needs female voters to turn out at the polls next year. He handily won them over in 2008, when 56 percent of women favored Obama...

The Pipeline SelloutObama puts politics over nation, again. In 2008, the slogan was “Yes We Can.� For 2011–12, it’s “We Can’t Wait.� What happened in between? Candidate Obama, the vessel into which myriad dreams were poured, met the reality of governance.His near–$1 trillion stimulus begat a stagnant economy with 9 percent unemployment. His attempt at Wall Street reform left in place a still too-big-to-fail financial system as vulnerable today as when he came into office. His green-energy fantasies yielded Solyndra cronyism and a cap-and-trade regime not even a Democratic Congress would pass.And now his signature achievement, Obamacare, is headed to...

First it was Keystone, now it’s coast-to-coast. Scared to affront his base in an election year, Obama has imposed a five-year drilling ban on a majority of offshore areas. This is particularly disappointing given America’s persistent unemployment. Unfortunately, this comes as no surprise. Obama’s recent decision to punt on Keystone may have effectively killed the project, and the thousands of jobs needed to complete the pipeline. Like Keystone, the Department of Interior’s five year lease plan leaves hundreds of thousands of jobs on the table. The Institute for Energy Research’s Dan Simmons points out a few facts about offshore oil...

WASHINGTON — The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970 The findings show a changed map of prosperity in the United States over the past four decades, with larger patches of affluence and poverty and a shrinking middle. In 2007, the last year captured by the data, 44 percent of families lived in neighborhoods the study defined as middle-income, down from 65 percent of families in 1970. At the same time, a third of American families lived in areas of either affluence or poverty, up from just 15 percent of families in 1970. The...

New poll numbers show that President Obama has suffered massive erosion in enthusiasm among voters under 30, dropping from 81 percent in November 2008 to 48 percent this month. Young voters, who were crucial to Obama’s election and are even more crucial to his re-election, have unemployment rates sharply higher than the national average. Obama rode into the White House in 2008 on a wave of hopeful young voters under 30. Three years later, though, that hope has waned and Obama must figure out how to again galvanize the youth vote if he expects to win re-election in 2012. The...

Just out from Challenger, the latest survey of job cuts: Employers announced plans to shed 115,730 workers from their payrolls in September, making it the worst job-cut month in over two years. Heavy reductions planned by the military accounted for a large portion of September job cuts, signaling what may lie ahead as the federal government seeks across-the-board cuts in spending. September job cuts were 126 percent higher than the 51,114 announced in August, according to the latest report on monthly job cuts released Wednesday by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. They were 212 percent higher than...

Subject: Auto-Response from Support - Do not reply Your mail was received and it is queued for a response In 2008 we were promised Hope and Change. We didn't think that meant Corby would have to downsize, slash our support staff and watch thousands of our long-time customers go out of business. It's like a bad dream. So, Corby can no longer answer emails quickly but we do process them in the order they are received so please bear with us. Please visit www.corby.com for more info.

To the dismay of consumer groups and the discomfort of Democrats, President Barack Obama wants Congress to make it easier for private debt collectors to call the cellphones of consumers delinquent on student loans and other billions owed the federal government. The change "is expected to provide substantial increases in collections, particularly as an increasing share of households no longer have landlines and rely instead on cellphones," the administration wrote recently. The little-noticed recommendation would apply only to cases in which money is owed the government, and is tucked into the mammoth $3 trillion deficit-reduction plan the president submitted to...

Fla. Rep. Allen West was asked if President Obama is just inept or if he is intentionally harming the economy. West says he’s definitely doing this on purpose. (Video at the Fox News link.)

Orders for long-lasting goods unexpectedly fell during August, the second drop in three months as manufacturers struggle with a bad economy. Durable-goods orders decreased by 0.1% from the prior month to $201.76 billion, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a 0.2% rise in orders during August for durables, which are goods designed to last at least three years. The drop followed a 4.1% surge in July and a 1.1% decline during June. In an encouraging sign within an otherwise uninspiring report, a barometer used to gauge spending by businesses on equipment rose. Orders...

Rep. Waters: Obama ‘got carried away’By Alicia M. Cohn, Daniel Strauss and Mike Lillis 09/26/11 09:19 PM ET Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on Monday tried to downplay friction between the black community and President Obama but warned the president might have gotten “carried away” in remarks made over the weekend. Waters, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), appeared in a number of media interviews on Monday following Obama’s speech to the CBC Gala on Saturday, where the president told the audience to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.” Waters said that there was room for improvement in the...

Obama Administration to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns 3:00 PM, Sep 23, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts Remember how Obama recently waived new ozone regulations at the EPA because they were too costly? Well, it seems that the Obama administration is would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer: Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere. The...

Gallup released a poll showing that, for the first time, a majority of Americans blame President Obama for the country's ongoing economic struggles, including 60% of independents. 53% of Americans think Obama deserves either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount" of blame for the economy. The numbers here might actually be worse for Obama than they appear. As Gallup notes, Obama's reelection bid depends on his ability to convince independents that he saved the economy from further catastrophe. But Gallup also reports that President Bush's negative numbers remain as high as they are "because Republicans are more willing to...

Rep. Waters urges Obama to drop nice-guy act and fight Republicans, Tea Party By Mike Lillis - 09/22/11 02:46 PM ET It’s time for President Obama to quit watching sports and drinking beer with his political opponents in the hope it will lead to a bipartisan agreement, Rep. Maxine Waters said Thursday. The outspoken California Democrat needs to fight harder against the GOP and Tea Party and for Democratic policy priorities, outspoken Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said Thursday. “He's been very nice about it,” Waters said of Obama’s budget negotiations with Republicans. “He's been on the other side of the...

So, Ohio, how do you like President Obama now that you have had 2 1/2 years of him in the Oval Office? The Buckeye State turned blue for him in 2008, as the majority of voters bought into his mantras of hope and change and yes we can. The centerpiece of his domestic policy is Obamacare and now a new study shows that 790,000 Ohioans will lose their private health insurance and premiums will rise 55%-85% when Obamacare takes full effect in 2014.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market. Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported. "This month's numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs," said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics table gives detail to the news that the unemployment rate has remained unchanged at a miserable 9.1%. Here are demographic specifics you will NOT see on Hussein's worshipful network news: Unemployment among blacks went from 15.9% to 16.7% IN ONE MONTH.

"When I talk to Democrats outside and inside the White House, as I did today. What I heard was a slightly different message," Howard Fineman said on tonight's "Hardball." Fineman reveals that the Democratic strategy in 2012 for the presidential and Congressional elections will be "down and dirty." "It's not going to be a 'Morning in America' campaign, it's going to be a darkness at midnight campaign about the Republicans. it's going to be about the fact that the Republicans in Congress pushed Paul Ryan's bill Medicare, about how they pushed Cut, Cap and Balance. It's about how Republicans wanted...

The Washington Post has decided to close all its local bureaus except those in the capitals of Virginia and Maryland. The Post, whose parent company reported a 50 percent drop in profits for its second quarter in early August, closed all of its national bureaus in 2009.