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The US economy shed 216,000 jobs in August, less than the 276,000 lost last month and the 225,000 loss economists were expecting, the Labor Department reported today. With monthly job losses still elevated, the unemployment rate rose to 9.7% in August, its highest level since June 1983. Labor also revised June job losses from 443,000 to 463,000 and July job losses from 247,000 to 276,000, which together adds another 49,000 jobs lost over the last three months. Economists have said the economy needs to create about 100,000 jobs each month to keep up with new workers, but with August's numbers,...

Four unions representing the nation's postal workers are pleading for a meeting with the White House to address possible funding shortfalls for workers' payroll and retiree health benefits, according to a letter obtained by CongressDaily. The letter alleges that USPS "may not be able to make payroll in October and will be forced to issue IOUs instead." Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for USPS, confirmed that the unions wrote the letter but disputed the claim that payroll deadlines will be missed.

Another steep drop in payrolls expected in April 580,000 lost jobs would be the least bad in six months By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch Last update: 10:13 a.m. EDT May 3, 2009 WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - U.S. workers lost jobs at a devastating rate again in April, but the expected loss of 580,000 would be least bad since October, economists said. Compared with what the economy has just seen, 580,000 lost jobs might look good. But in absolute terms, it'd be horrible. Aside from the current recession, it would be in percentage terms the eighth worst month for job losses in the...

No other stimulus provision will be as immediate and as effective,' says small business lobby Posted: December 14, 2008 10:51 pm Eastern © 2008 WorldNetDaily WASHINGTON – Big business bailouts and "economic stimulus packages" are all the rage in the Capitol these days. Most involve massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to government-directed projects. But a new and very different bill, proposed by a heretofore little-known congressman from Texas, is gaining traction from Republicans – and even a few Democrats, according to the sponsor. It's called "the tax-holiday plan." And one version of it picked up support from the National...

How much is a CEO worth? What is appropriate compensation for the leader of a large and complex organization? The standard reply has always been, “Let the market decide.” Lately, though, markets have proven themselves to be spectacularly ill-suited to be the last word on just about any issue. Even before Alan Greenspan recently and belatedly figured it out, “the invisible hand” and “magic” of the markets were mostly what their airy nomenclature implies: figments of irrational economic exuberance. Markets have never been stand-alone forces of nature; rather they are shaped, controlled and guided by human beings as fallible and...

The state of California's payroll is skyrocketing, even as its budget deficit has grown to billions of dollars in recent months. In Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first four years, the total bill for state workers' salaries jumped by 37 percent, compared with a 5 percent increase in the preceding four years under then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Chronicle analysis of state payroll records shows. One month before Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, just eight state employees earned more than $200,000 a year working in the core state government, which excludes universities and the Legislature. In April of this year, there were...

Nonfarm private employment grew 130,000 from December 2007 to January of 2008 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment ReportTM. The estimated change in employment from November to December was revised down 3,000 to 37,000. January's increase of 130,000 is consistent with nonfarm private employment growth that averaged 110,000 during the three-month period from October through December 2007.

Ten months after installing a new computerized payroll process that has been roiled by glitches, Los Angeles Unified officials now say costs for fixing the system and completing its rollout could top $210 million. The system, with an original price tag of $95 million, has underpaid or overpaid thousands of employees, and last week district officials said hiring consultants to fix it has already ballooned the cost to $132.5 million. And some officials are questioning the district's transparency on all the costs associated with the system, noting that at least $6 million will be forfeited by allowing some overpaid teachers...

WASHINGTON -- More than the ascension of Nancy Pelosi & Co. was disturbing congressional Republicans last week. They worried that George W. Bush may proceed down the same path that made his father a one-term president. Thus, they ask this question: Will the current President Bush embrace a tax increase that would produce potential economic disaster and guaranteed political catastrophe?

We're grateful to our police officers. We count on them. We're proud of them.  Our state is going broke paying for them.  Same goes for teachers. We wish we could afford them, but we're having trouble.  We're having trouble paying for New Jersey's nearly 500,000 public employees. Especially at their current salaries and fringe benefits. Especially with New Jersey's property taxes among the steepest in the nation and rising.  Especially now that state officials have closed a $4.5 billion budget gap by raising taxes and cutting services while sidestepping the subject of how we compensate unionized public workers.  This isn't...

New Jersey added 59,400 state and local-government jobs in the first half of this decade, even as private-sector employment was flat, a Star-Ledger analysis has found. The 11 percent increase in government jobs -- driven largely by ballooning education payrolls -- outpaced population growth and came at a time of rising anger over skyrocketing property taxes. "It's an incredible number that leaves private businessmen and taxpayers scratching their heads and saying, 'How is this possible?'" said Philip Kirschner, president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association. "The economy is the same for all of us, so where are the...

Document ISGQ-2004-00060580 is a memo that contains a direct order form Saddam Hussein in the middle of the war asking to treat the Arab Feedayeen i.e. the non Iraqi Foreign Arab Terrorists as equal as the Iraqi soldier in salary and benefits and not just any soldier but like those in the Special Forces. These are the same Arab terrorists who stayed in Iraq after the removal of the regime and caused those horrible attacks mostly on innocent civilians. This document is a follow on another document where the Iraqi were training Foreign Arab terrorist since the year 2000 (please...

U.S. Economy Adds Fewer Jobs Than Expected in October (NYT) Payrolls Expand in Oct.; Jobless Rate Dips (AP)

Have you signed up with your employer for an automatic payroll deposit? Then be warned. The employer has access to your bank account for 5 days after the deposit is made. Technically, the employer can only debit your account to reverse an error. BUT IN REALITY, he can debit your account for the full amount of your check for any reason he chooses. Revenge. Coercion. Whatever. Your bank won't care; it's not their problem. His bank won't care, or they may fake it and just not call you back. The ACH people won't care. Mid-America Payment Exchange won't care (it's...

In January 1937 the Federal Government began taking Social Security taxes from the paychecks of Americans. Americans have been whining and voting to get their money back ever since. Election after election, year after year, the retirement that American workers are owed and have prepaid is held at virtual gunpoint by the same sort of politicians that 68 years ago sold the program as a new “freedom” -- freedom from worry in old age. Now old age is filled with worry about Social Security. Vote for me or the other guy will steal your Social Security.No, vote for me or...

WASHINGTON - Payroll growth across the country was sluggish in March as employers added just 110,000 jobs, the smallest increase since July. Nevertheless, the labor market accommodated enough people to drop the unemployment rate to 5.2 percent. The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, offered another mixed picture of America's hiring climate. The job market has been the sector of the economy that has been among the slowest to recover from the last recession. Payroll growth, as measured by a survey of businesses, slowed in March. Job losses at factories and in the retail sector tempered gains in...

A Republican senator promoting the idea of a payroll tax increase is under fierce attack by some conservatives. Sen. Lindsey Graham's proposal to lift the $90,000 cap on payroll taxes to pay for Social Security reform has prompted the conservative Club for Growth to blanket his home state of South Carolina with television ads accusing the first-term Republican of proposing a "huge tax hike" that would hurt families and small businesses. "Why Lindsey Graham? He is the one Republican who is by far the most outspoken advocate of lifting this cap and raising it very significantly. This would be a...

Bass boat or Baby? Feminism or family? Another mouth to feed or leather seats in your luxury SUV? For over thirty-five years most Americans have decided that children are a blessing --the kind to be enjoyed in a very small number that does not interfere with the better marketed blessings of ambition, "me time", and competitive consumerism. The "population pyramid" we all learned about in Social Studies class is thus as dead as a restrained Judiciary (or the Dodo, for that matter), replaced by a weakening "population column," as people have fewer and fewer children. This will mean two things....

by Stephen Moore and Lawrence Hunter President Bush has been heroic in pushing personal investment accounts for Social Security. But he's still got the wrong marketing strategy. At his press briefing Wednesday, Bush again stated that personal retirement accounts are insufficient to make Social Security permanently solvent. With all due respect, Mr. President, you're wrong. The chief actuary of Social Security has scored four separate personal-accounts plans as achieving full solvency without tax increases or benefit cuts. The President makes this mistake because he is receiving bad economic and political advice. The misconception that personal accounts are inadequate not only...

HB3 - Conservatives Must Stop the "Payroll Tax" Now! by Matthew J. Griffing, Esq. Senior Vice Chairman for Legislative Affairs The Republican-led Texas House of Representatives has taken a big step toward doing what Democrats could not do in over 120 consecutive years in power – enacting a virtual state income tax. For many years, Texas Republicans advocated fiscal restraint, and their opposition to a state income tax was axiomatic. Those days are long over, and Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland) is to blame. This session, the House Leadership led by Speaker Craddick is dumping billions of new wasteful spending into...

In 2001, Dems claimed to support Social Security reform -- as long as it meant sacrificing tax relief. ----- Did you know there once was a time when Democrats admitted they believed Social Security needed protection and reform? Of course, it's quite significant that, of the occasions they took to trumpet the need to fix the program, they were the loudest when they used Social Security reform to justify their strident opposition to President Bush's first tax relief package in the first few months of 2001. Juxtaposing the Democratic Party's lackadaisical position on Social Security reform today (remember, they actually...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund. A questioner from the audience, stressing his own Democratic credentials, said he believed Ryan's plan should attract members of his own party and wondered whether the Wisconsin lawmaker...

ITHACA--According to the Ithaca Journal (which cannot be reposted here thanks to the cretins at Gannett news), the City of Ithaca and the rest of Tompkins County is considering imposing a local income tax.According to the article, the democrat-controlled legislature is looking at a 10 percent surcharge on top of the amount of state taxes county residents pay. They are also considering an additional 1 percent surcharge on income of more than $100,000, and 2 percent added for incomes of $200,000 or more.Recognizing that a lot of people drive into the county to work at Cornell from outlying (red counties),...

In the Social Security debate, the one thing that every politician and media analyst seems to agree upon is that however Social Security is eventually saved, benefits for each retiree must not be reduced. To do so is unthinkable, because it would break the “promise” of Social Security. People have done their part, it is argued. They’ve paid their odious payroll taxes for decades and done so with the confidence that it was for a reason -- that in the end they would be provided for, at some humble level, in the twilight of their lives. But what, exactly, was...

Contrary to conventional thinking, allowing workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal retirement accounts will incur no net cost to the federal government. The misconception that there will be new costs--i.e., "transition costs"--arises from forgetting that Social Security is already, in effect, debt-financed. Consequently: 1) Any debt sold to the public in the short term during the so-called "transition period" to pay all promised Social Security benefits simply refinances an existing liability; and 2) Refinancing Social Security's debt through personal accounts makes possible a reduction, and eventually an elimination, of Social Security's unfunded liability, which...

Recently enacted NY state income tax withholding for 2005 require employers to w/h taxes on all types of employee earning. Even if your visit is for 5 minutes! Go to NY for business and you're taxed by a complex and burdensome process.

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Ken Mehlman, Bush campaign manager, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the campaign should focus on Kerry's judgment during his 20 years in office. We will, too, starting soon. However, Bob Dole said two weeks ago that he can't remember a single piece of legislation that Kerry sponsored. We can. We can remember a lot of the hateful legislation Kerry supported; legislation that would have definitely been harmful to low and middle-income American families. Democrats are generally uninformed, politically. In all fairness, many of them are occupied trying to make ends meet and just have no time to pay attention...

August 7, 2004NEWS ANALYSIS: THE CAMPAIGNLow Numbers, New ProblemBy KATHARINE Q. SEELYE ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - All week long, President Bush traveled the country, cheerfully telling audiences that ''we've turned the corner'' on the economy. But on Friday, in the face of the government's paltry new numbers on job growth, the president's new slogan suddenly sounded premature at best.Republicans had hoped the early indications this year that the economy was turning the corner would have allowed them to neutralize, or even turn to their advantage, the issue that John Kerry had once considered central to his White House bid. Instead,...

<p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lounging in Hawaii on spring break with his wife and kids, tells a reporter that state lawmakers should follow his lead and take more time off. The Legislature, he says, "doesn't have enough to do." Their full-time status in Sacramento simply gives them too much time to make mischief.</p>

WASHINGTON — Friday brought good news on the economic front, with the Labor Department reporting that 308,000 jobs were added last month. But total payroll employment still appears sickly if one looks back over the last three years. There have been two million jobs lost since March 2001. Or have there? It depends, as usual, on which statistics you use. And there is reason to doubt the numbers from the payroll survey, which the Labor Department has used since 1939, because they give a misleading picture of the 2004 economy. The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll...

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Hit by waning support from fatigued donor nations, the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) has been forced to borrow from banks to pay salaries to its 125,000 employees and may be unable to meet its February payroll, the economy minister said Tuesday. Meanwhile, an Israeli settler was shot dead in a West Bank ambush, and a Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites). With unemployment rampant outside the public payroll, Palestinians could be facing unprecedented economic collapse after three years of conflict with Israel. "We took...

ADD another billion, more or less, to California's budget crisis. When state lawmakers finally got around to approving a budget, they managed to make the document look a mere $8.1 billion in the red -- significantly lower than the earlier estimate of $38 billion. But the politicians' dirty little secret is that many of the savings they claim to have achieved were imaginary -- derived from accounting gimmicks, borrowing, and forecasts based on rosy assumptions that had little chance of ever coming true. One of those rosy predictions was that the state's public-employee unions would agree to forgo the pay...

NORTH CONWAY - Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry rallied a trades convention yesterday by slamming President Bush and repeating his call for a "payroll-tax holiday." The Massachusetts senator said the saved taxes would help the average worker immediately. He also called for more investment in infrastructure, training and other programs to restore the 2.5 million jobs he said have been lost during Bush's presidency. In the past, Kerry has said the payroll tax holiday would apply to the first $10,000 of income, meaning no Social Security or Medicare taxes would be collected on that amount. It would apply for one...

GEORGE GALLOWAY said he was pelted with eggs today when he spoke at a May Day rally. The Glasgow Kelvin MP was speaking at a workers' festival in Wallasey, Merseyside, to a crowd of around 200 supporters. When he began his speech, a shaven-headed man threw three objects including eggs and shouted: "You are up Saddam's a***." The man was confronted by several members of the crowd before being arrested by police to prevent a breach of the peace. He gave his name as David Anson, a 41-year-old unemployed builder from the local area, and said: "I don't agree with...

<p>The former Fresno-area lawmaker provided a key Republican vote for last year's budget, which was two months overdue.</p> <p>A former Republican assemblyman who delivered key state budget votes for Democrats the last two years has surfaced as a paid horse racing consultant to the Assembly's top Democrat.</p>

<p>SAN FRANCISCO(AP) - More than 100 employees who work for Gov. Gray Davis draw their salaries from other state agencies, and are not on his payroll, according to a newspaper.</p> <p>The 112 employees work directly for Davis and account for more than $7.7 million in salaries annually, according to documents obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.</p>

The demorats keep saying that the poor don't participate in the tax cuts and that they DO pay taxes via the payroll tax (ss/medicare). But the rats never mentiong the 'Earned Income (tax) Credit'. After finding brochure on a left activist website on how to encourage people to sign-up for the program, pdf file HERE ,it seems to me that not only do people that qualify under the table in the document pay very little, if any, income tax, they also pay very little if any payroll tax! Am my assumption wrong here? Why aren't we beating the dems over...

I am asking Freeper help and advice on this. There is a certain Sheriff Deputy in Atlanta who works as a side job at an abortion clinic. The last two weekends, he has arrested "little old ladies" for being on the sidewalk. Ginny was first, and now Louise. The City of Atlanta will not honor his arrest, and he must summons Sheriff Deputy cars to take his "notorious" "little old ladies" to jail. This smells of RICO and other things. Additional, the escorts for the abortion clients are supposedly involved in Witchcraft (one witch and one warlock, if my understanding...