United Liberty

With ObamaCare dominating the news and blogs this week, you may think that it’s the biggest issue on the minds of Americans. You’d be wrong.

Gallup finds that jobs and economy are our top concerns:

The poll also finds that in the long-term, Americans are more worried about budget deficits and the economy than health care.

The National Center for Policy Analysis explains the results of a recent Ball State University study into the effects of the recent minimum wage increase, which the authors say cost 550,000 jobs:

A study of part-time workers monitored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1999 to 2009 found that raising the minimum wage to its current level of $7.25 during the recent recession caused some businesses to scale back on filling vacant positions or eliminate jobs altogether, says Michael J. Hicks, director of Ball State’s Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER).

Other findings:

• About 67 percent of teenagers and young adult minimum wage workers live in households with incomes at least twice the poverty level (for example $44,000 for a family of four).
• Adult workers toiling at minimum wage have limited skill.
• About two-thirds of all adult minimum wage workers have a high school degree or less.
• One benefit of the minimum wage keeping some of these workers out the labor market is that it forces them to obtain additional education and training in the workforce development network.

According to the study, mostly teenage workers were affected by the hike. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that almost 49% of minimum wage workers were between the ages of 18 and 25.

Minimum wage laws keep new workers from gaining skills in entry level jobs needed to be successful. Lawmakers may mean well when they pass minimum wage laws, but they hurt the very people they intend to “help.”

As you may know, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) has been holding up $10 billion in extended unemployment benefits. It’s a procedural tactic. Every time another Senator calls for unanimous consent, Bunning objects. Unfortunately, not many in his caucus are defending him.

Some in the media are calling it a filibuster. It’s not. And Bunning is not doing this because he philosophically opposes unemployment benefits. He plans on voting for them. Bunning is objecting because he wants the Democratic majority to abide by the PAY-GO rules. For those of you that don’t know, PAY-GO requires any new spending to be paid for by a tax increase or spending cuts. This different from paying for this extension through debt.

While I wish Bunning were doing this on philosophical and constitutional grounds, kudos to him for standing up for holding Democrats accountable.

This morning’s unemployment report gave us the seemingly good news that the unemployment rate dropped three-tenths of one percent, but when you look behind that number the news still isn’t good:

WASHINGTON — The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent from 10 percent while employers shed 20,000 jobs, the government said Friday.

The rate dropped because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.

The report also included an annual revision to the estimates of total payrolls, which showed there were 930,000 fewer jobs last March than previously estimated. The department also revised down its estimates for April through October of last year, adding another 433,000 job losses.

The November figure was revised higher, however, to show a gain of 64,000 jobs.

All told, the Great Recession has eliminated 8.4 million jobs, the department said. That’s the most of any recession since World War II as a proportion of total payrolls.

So, let’s add it up.

We lost 20,000 jobs in January. That’s the number that matters. The down-tick in the unemployment rate is related to the fact that the BLS included data from a different survey in calculating the rate. How legitimate that number is, and whether it involves something less than honest on their part, I’ll leave for others to determine. What’s important is that we lost 20,000 jobs in January even though the rate went down.

In addition to that, there were revisions to previous jobs reports:

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, another 190,000 jobs were lost in October and the nation’s unemployment rate now stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. The broader unemployment rate is 17.5%, that is “people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.”

Congress and the Obama Administration claimed the unemployment rate would not exceed 7.9% with the passage of the “stimulus” bill.

As it turns out, the Obama Administration has a very flexible definition of what a “saved” job is:

The Obama administration announced Friday that federal stimulus money had created or saved about 7,200 education jobs in Ohio as of Sept. 30.

Although a couple of hundred of those jobs were in Columbus City Schools, the district acknowledged yesterday that many of the “saved” jobs definitely wouldn’t have been lost in the first place, and others might not have been lost at all.

“I know we explained to (the Ohio Department of Education) what we were doing, and they told us what categories to use,” said Jill Dannemiller, director of federal programs for the Columbus schools.

Although other areas of the district’s budget might have suffered without the stimulus, district officials said, the jobs report nonetheless highlighted the fuzzy math involved in pinpointing a saved-jobs number.

(…)

Of the 212.5 full-time equivalent jobs the district said were funded with part of the $64 million in stimulus it expects to receive, about 65 percent were “saved,” including 36 principals and assistant principals.

So was the district on the verge of laying off 36 school administrators?

“No,” Dannemiller said, explaining that the reporting choices were “created” and “saved.”

“They weren’t ‘created,’ obviously, so our only other choice was ’saved.’ ”