posted on January 9, 2004 01:04:15 PM new
And it just keeps getting worse !! Bush is going to get what his Dad got- the boot from office !!!
Payrolls Barely Rise in Weak Jobs Report
1-9-04
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American employers hardly took on any new workers in December, a disappointing government report on Friday said, indicating the economic recovery has yet to translate into sustained jobs growth.
The unemployment rate fell to 5.7 percent, the lowest in over a year and down from 5.9 percent in November. But this was mainly because 309,000 people dropped out of the work force.
The number of workers on U.S. payrolls outside the farm sector in December increased by just 1,000, after a downwardly revised rise of 43,000 in November. It was the fifth consecutive monthly climb but was far below economist expectations for a rise of 130,000.
The poor report is a headache for President Bush as he seeks re-election in November with the economy -- specifically job creation -- expected to be a key issue in the campaign.
But Bush, speaking to a small business forum, was upbeat, saying all economic signs were "very strong." He said the drop in the unemployment rate was a "positive sign" of an improving economy.
Economists disagreed.
"It's a shocker. The one ray of sunshine, the decline in the unemployment rate, is ironically a sign of weakness," said Cary Leahey, senior U.S. economist, Deutsche Bank Securities, New York.
"The only reason it declined is that fewer people were looking for jobs in December."
Since Bush took office, more than 2.3 million non farm jobs have been lost.
Pollster John Zogby said his surveys still show 21 percent of people, and 25 percent of those earning over $75,000, are afraid of losing their jobs in the next year.
Democrats seized the opportunity to criticize Bush's record on the economy.
"I think it's time that George W. Bush loses his job so that we can put the American people back to work," said Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark.
The dollar and stock market fell and U.S. Treasury bond prices rose after the report.
The data will likely reinforce expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will keep interest rates on hold at 45-year lows at its next policy meeting on Jan. 27-28, and for some time after that.
"The good news is that there is absolutely no pressure on the Fed to raise rates any time in the foreseeable future," said Edgar Peters, chief investment officer, Panagora Asset Management Inc.
JOB-SEEKERS DISCOURAGED
The Labor Department, though, said there were 433,000 "discouraged" workers in December who were not looking for work because they believed no jobs were available, up from 403,000 a year ago. The jobless rate had been forecast to hold steady at 5.9 percent.
Economists had been expecting a more robust rise in payrolls, encouraged by a reasonable holiday shopping season and a drop in filings for jobless benefits in December.
However, the report showed retailers cut payrolls by 38,000, which the department said was caused by general merchandise stores taking on fewer workers than usual.
The troubled manufacturing sector failed to break its job-cutting trend, shedding 26,000 jobs in December, the 41st month of declines. Some economists, pointing to recent data suggesting a turnaround in manufacturing, had predicted factories would finally take on new workers in December.
In another bad sign for job seekers, the number of hours worked per week dropped to 33.7 from 33.9 in November. The average workweek had been expected to climb to 34.0 hours. Employers often increase the amount of hours worked by existing workers before taking on new hires.
Economists say productivity gains have helped speed up economic growth but allow companies to raise output without creating new jobs.
One bright spot in the report was hiring in construction, which was up 14,000. The building industry has boomed as low mortgage rates have fueled home buying.
posted on January 9, 2004 02:26:58 PM new
And whatever side of the NAFTA issue you are on....it was clinton that brought it into being. A non partisan issue...it was stated. But now...job losses because of ALL our open trade agreements are all Bush's fault. wrong.....
---begin article:
If you had only the rhetoric of this year's Democratic presidential candidates to go by, you would never guess that the most successful Democratic politician of our time was an advocate of free trade and a champion of NAFTA, the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement that merged the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a single common market.
"The only way we can pass on the American Dream of the last 40 years to our children and their children . . . is to adapt" to the "winds of global competition" that have transformed the world's economy, President Bill Clinton said at the NAFTA signing ceremony on Sept. 14, 1993. He described the struggle over NAFTA as "[b]a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow, or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday[/i]."
Preceding Clinton at the dais that day was Vice President Al Gore, who noted that among the many dignitaries in attendance were three former presidents -- Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republicans Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush.
"There are some issues that transcend ideology," Gore declared. "The view is so uniform that it unites people in both parties. . . . NAFTA is such an issue."
That statement would have gotten no argument from another of the notables on hand for the NAFTA signing: Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. "I was a very strong supporter of NAFTA," Dean recalled in 1995. NAFTA is "a good policy," he said. "I believe it's going to create jobs in the United States of America, and to let our trading partner go down the tubes . . . would be a big mistake."
Yet to hear Dean now, you would think his support of NAFTA had been grudging at best, and that robust free trade was a policy no mainstream Democrat could endorse. When an intervewer recently began a question by noting that Dean had been "a strong supporter of NAFTA," the former governor bit his head off: "Where do you get this 'I'm a strong supporter of NAFTA?' I never did anything about it. I didn't vote on it. I didn't march down the street demanding NAFTA. I simply wrote a letter supporting NAFTA."
During the Democrats' debate in Iowa this week, Dean's comments on NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, a linchpin of international free trade, were even harsher.
"I believe that NAFTA and the WTO only globalized the rights of multinational corporations. . . . They are not going to globalize human rights, environmental rights, the right to organize. That needs to happen. And if it doesn't happen, NAFTA and the WTO simply aren't going to work."
Aren't going to work? By any reasonable measure, NAFTA and the free-trade policy of which it is a bulwark have been a triumph.
Since 1993, US-Mexico trade has tripled, to more than $230 billion a year. Canada and Mexico are now America's two largest trading partners, far ahead of Japan. That "giant sucking sound" of lost jobs and manufacturing facilities that NAFTA was supposed to engender never materialized.
The modest trickle of US manufacturing investment that has flowed to Mexico has been dwarfed by the net inflow of such investment TO the United States from the rest of the world. Millions of new US jobs were created after NAFTA took effect -- a fact Democrats should be eager to trumpet, since nearly all those jobs were created on Clinton's watch.
Yet the Democrats running for president, with the exception of Senator Joe Lieberman, are vying to outdo each other in denouncing the instruments of free trade that help make such gains possible. In the Iowa debate, Congressman Richard Gephardt, a longtime protectionist, was for steel tarrifs and against NAFTA. Senator John Edwards patted himself on the back for having voted "against the Chilean trade agreement, against the Caribbean trade agreement, against the Singapore trade agreement, against final passage of fast track." Represenative Dennis Kucinich vowed to cancel NAFTA on his first day in office.
And even Senator John Kerry, despite a long record of opposing import quotas and other trade barriers, tried to cast himself as an enemy of free trade. "The important thing," he said, "is I would not support the Free Trade of the Americas Act, I would not support the Central American Free Trade Act until they have stronger standards. If they sent them to my desk, I'd veto them."
Alone among the Democrats, only Lieberman has resisted the cynical temptation to attack free trade.
"We can't create jobs by building up walls of protectionism," he argued. One-fifth of Iowa's manufacturing jobs depend on exports, Lieberman said, and the No. 2 and No. 3 markets for Iowa products are none other than Canada and Mexico. "You break NAFTA, you're going to cut out tens of thousands of jobs here in Iowa." And millions, he might have added, nationwide.
When trade barriers come down, prices do, too. Former Treasury Secretary (and Harvard's current president) Lawrence Summers has called the Clinton-Gore trade agreements "the biggest tax cut in the history of the world."
Do Dean and the Dean wannabes really think it makes political sense to run *against* that record?
posted on January 9, 2004 04:30:14 PM new
Paul O'Neal, Bush's former Treasurery Sec said ina recent 60 Minutes interview that observing a Bush Cabinet meeting was like watching a blindman speak to the deaf.
It's soooo good to have you back Reamond....even if you have gone to 'the other side
Linda K I am on the side of good government no matter who is in the White House.
PS. I was never gone, I always check in to read the posts - I just don't always post.
posted on January 9, 2004 04:37:08 PM new
Regarding NAFTA, WTO etc.. We do not need to totally do away with these institutions and it really makes no diference who wasa for or against them, we only need someone in the White House that has the ability to manage these things. Bush obviously can not get the job done.
Maybe Bush should find an internship for Monica Lewinsky at the White House.
posted on January 9, 2004 04:48:41 PM new
That's how I judge who I give my vote too, Reamond. And that's why Bush will be getting my vote this November.
This recession started before Bush was in office. Then 9-11 and etc. I think he's done as good a job as any democrat who's running would have done/will do.
Even though I was against his Medicare bill, I look at it as most of the democrats didn't support it because they didn't think enough was funded. They wanted it bigger....so they voted against it.
They're all running on the platform to raise our taxes...either straight out or by eliminating Bush's tax cuts. I'm for neither.
Most candidates want some form of national health care. That's only going to raise our decifits...or raise our taxes to an unbelieveable level. I'm against that.
But the more important issue to me is terrorism. I worry about all the flip-flopping the dem candidates have done on the war...defending our nation. I know where Bush stands and I like that.
Edited to add: I also like the Social Security privatization Bush spoke about before the market crashed. I'd support that too. I think it's the only way to not raise taxes of our young people in order to take care of us old one's in our retirement. I like people being offered the choice of how THEY would like to see their money used. Rather than the way it is now.
[ edited by Linda_K on Jan 9, 2004 04:51 PM ]
posted on January 9, 2004 09:17:34 PM new
WASHINGTON [AP]--The Bush administration is committed to making its tax cuts permanent at the same time it intends to cut the budget deficit in half within five years, Treasury Secretary John Snow said Wednesday.
Snow's comments were immediately challenged by Democrats, who accused the administration of continuing policies of showering the rich with massive tax cuts that will jeopardize the government's ability to honor commitments to 77 million baby boomers who will begin retiring early in the next decade.
The International Monetary Fund also weighed in on the budget debate Wednesday, with its economists issuing a new report warning that the exploding U.S. deficits, if not dealt with, could threaten the global economy through a sharp plunge in the value of the dollar and higher interest rates both in this country and around the world.
The IMF report also challenged the administration's basic tenet that the deficit can be dealt with by a rebounding economy generating higher revenues and stronger efforts to curb government spending.
"Given the magnitude of this adjustment (needed to get the budget back to balance), it would seem likely that both revenue measures and sustained spending restraints would be needed," the IMF economists said in a report entitled, "U.S. Fiscal Policies and Priorities for Long-Run Sustainability."
In his speech, Snow argued that the tax cuts had been a major force lifting the U.S. economy out of a recession and a prolonged period of sluggish growth.
Snow said a Treasury Department analysis showed that without the tax cuts the unemployment rate, currently 5.9%, would be a full percentage point higher and as many as 1.5 million Americans would not now have jobs.
But Democrats argued that even if the recent positive job growth continues through next November, Bush will not have made up all the jobs lost in the first three years of his administration, giving him the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover.
"Secretary Snow can divide and multiply his tax cut arguments anyway he wants, but one fact will remain unchanged: Fewer people will have jobs come November of this year than had them when President Bush took office," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said the administration's huge deficits "will stifle future job growth and burden our children and grandchildren with debt."
posted on January 10, 2004 06:28:47 AM new CNBC Market Dispatches 1/9/2004
Surprising jobs report sucker-punches stocks
The Dow tumpble 133 points after a report that nonfarm payrolls rose by a mere 1,000 in December, 149,000 less than economists expected. Royal Dutch saps oil stocks. Some telecoms struggle after a big downgrade.
For a day at least, the party stopped on Wall Street.
What seemed to be a happy stock market turned sour as traders, who had been confident in economic growth and corporate earnings, took a look at today’s employment report from the Labor Department.
They gasped
The nation’s cadre of economists were looking for a gain of 150,000 jobs, maybe even 300,000 jobs. Instead, the Labor Department reported a gain of just 1,000 jobs. And the numbers for October and November, which raised so much hope the job market was finally improving, were both revised downward
While tech stocks were strong through the morning and into the afternoon, investor interest sagged in the last afternoon. And the whole market began to fall back -- except for gold stocks and bonds.
The Dow Jones industrials tumbled by 130 points. The Nasdaq Composite was down 13 points, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 10 points.
Partly, the decline can be attributed to a growing consensus that the stock market was “overbought,” said CNBC’s Bob Pisani. Stocks had big gains last year and had mostly pushed ahead in the five trading sessions through Thursday. It was time to take money off the table. And there was depressing effects from a downgrade of SBC Communications (SBC, news, msgs ) and Royal Dutch’s ( RD, news, msgs ) announcement that it was reducing its estimate of proved reserves by 20%.
But the jobs report dominated everyone’s thinking. The report was “very, very disappointing,” admitted Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute on CNBC’s “Street Signs.”
"Jobs were supposed to be the kicker to keep this recovery going, CNBC economics reporter Steve Liesman said, but those hopes were "dashed today."
The unemployment rate did fall to 5.7% from 5.9% in November. But CNBC's Hampton Pearson explained that it did so because the labor force declined last month as "a lot of people simply gave up hope."
Bill Sullivan, Morgan Stanley's senior economist, said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" that structural impediments to job growth remain, including high productivity, which allows companies to hold off on hiring, and the move toward outsourcing jobs. "We don't have any evidence of solid job creation" and that must be factored into financial and economic projections, Sullivan said.
Today's jobs number is even more disappointing considering that it’s the 25th month of the recovery, he said. "We need to do better on job creation to sustain growth," he said.
Just to illustrate disappointment, here’s a bit more perspective. In the last three months of 2003, Canada created 173,000 new jobs, reports Phillippa Dunne of the Liscio Report. The United States, with a workforce eight times as large, created only 144,000 jobs.
To be sure, today’s statistics will be revised for the next two months and will start to pick up jobs created by small business, but don’t expect the employment number to jump to 150,000 or even 300,000.
posted on January 10, 2004 10:45:55 AM new
No way would I vote for Bush. He looks like a bigger liar than LBJ. Now what shall we tell all the widows,parents and children of the brave soldiers that died in Iraq ? The SOB Bush lied to us all !!!! NOW I HOPE EVERYONE SEES THE DIFFERENCE IN CONSEQUENCES ABOUT A GREAT PRESIDENT THAT LIES ABOUT A BJ AND AN IDIOT PRESIDENT THAT LIES ABOUT USING MILITARY FORCE. NO ONE DIED FROM THE BJ. Better radjust your moral compass.
Bush Planned Iraqi Invasion Pre-Sept. 11
Jan. 10 — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it.
O'Neill, fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush's economic team, has become the first major insider of the Bush administration to launch an attack on the president.
He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty."
To go to war, Bush used the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had to be stopped in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. The weapons have never been found.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said in the "60 Minutes" interview scheduled to air on Sunday. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."
CBS released excerpts from the interview on Friday and Saturday.
The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein, CBS said.
"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'
Another Pentagon document entitled "Foreign suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts" talks about contractors from 40 countries and which ones have interest in Iraq, Suskind said.
BENT ON WAR
O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it," said O'Neill. "The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this."'
White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected O'Neill's remarks.
"We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business of doing book reviews, it appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," he said on Saturday.
O'Neill also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neil told "60 Minutes."
Suskind's book, whose full title is "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," uses interviews with O'Neill, dozens of White House insiders and 19,000 documents provided by O'Neill.
O'Neill, who was fired due to disagreements over tax cuts, spent a difficult two years in Washington, joining the Bush administration with a background as a no-nonsense corporate executive.
posted on January 10, 2004 02:01:03 PM new
And it just gets worse....
Job Searches in 2003 the Longest in 20 Years
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The year 2003 was the most difficult for U.S. job hunters since 1983, as they faced the gloomiest job market in years, according to Labor Department figures released on Friday.
The unemployment rate was the highest since 1994, and the search for a new job was the longest in two decades.
According to Labor Department data, the average spell of unemployment lasted 19.2 weeks in 2003, or almost five months. That was the longest average duration since 1983, when the U.S. economy was emerging from the worst recession since the Depression. Then the average spell was 20.0 weeks.
As a percentage of all the unemployed, the long-term jobless -- those out of work for 27 weeks or more -- made up 22.1 percent in 2003, the highest annual number since 23.9 percent in 1983.
Democrats have called for renewing a federally-funded extension of unemployment benefits offered through states to deal with the problem. They revived their attacks on Friday after a weaker-than-expected jobs report showed only 1,000 new hires in December. Measures of long-term joblessness improved slightly in the month, though.
While Bush administration officials have continually repeated that they will not be satisfied "until every American who wants a job can get one," it has yet to support a renewal of extended benefits, a move many economists say would help blunt the economic damage of the rise in long-term unemployment.
In early December, Treasury Secretary John Snow told Reuters the administration had yet to decide if it would support extending the program for a third time.
According to the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about 80,000 to 90,000 workers will be exhausting their state-funded benefits every week by late January, after the program's eligibility ended in December.
"Unemployment is the Achilles' heel of this administration and Congressional Republicans, and they cannot continue to ignore it," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, of Maryland.
Lee Price, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute and a former Clinton-era Commerce Department official, said the long-term jobless numbers show how difficult the labor market remains.
Extending jobless benefits again would stimulate the economy by putting money in the pockets of people not getting paychecks, Price said. "Almost 100 percent of that is going to be spent," he said.
posted on January 12, 2004 12:49:58 PM newEmployment Declines of a Magnitude Not Seen Since 1944-45
Louis Uchitelle writes about the employment sitch:
Growth in Jobs Came to a Halt During December:
Dropping out has been a characteristic of the recovery
since June, reflecting the struggles of the unemployed
amid companies' reluctance to add workers. As a
result, the percentage of the working-age population participating in the labor force -- that is, employed or
seeking employment -- fell to 66 percent in December from 66.5 percent in June, a withdrawal of roughly 1.1
million people. Reflecting this exodus, the employment-to-population ratio -- a measure of the
percentage of the working-age population actually holding jobs -- has been dropping, as well. It has fallen
nearly eight-tenths of a percentage point, to 62.2
percent, since the recession ended in November 2001, and 2.1 percentage points since the start of the
recession in March of that year.
