Today’s Poser

I could be wrong, but, if we are spending $600 billion to incentivize small businesses to retain their employees with COVID-19 emergency loans (really grants), why is our unemployment rate still going through the roof?

Trump vs. Obama

Like most things these days, Libs refuse to acknowledge that the booming “Trump economy” exists. Invariably any lauding of Trump’s economic or stock market successes elicits the response that Trump has benefitted from Obama’s head start. Is his true? Has Trump been piggybacking on the Obama recovery? Opinions vary ... but here are the facts:

Dow Jones Industrial Average

Day Obama Elected  —  9323
Day Trump Elected — 17,888

Day Obama Inaugurated  — 7550
Day Trump Inaugurated —  19,827

Today.   29,423


Percentage Increases

Trump Election Day till now — 64.5% (over 3+ years)
Obama Election Day till Trump Election Day — 91.9% (over 8 years)

Clearly, so far Trump is ahead (assuming his recovery continues ... which, given the coronavirus outbreak, may be in jeopardy.) Comparing these stock market records deserves acknowledgement of some contributing and detracting factors:

- Obama benefitted from the Fed injecting $3.7 trillion into the money supply and reducing interest rates to near zero. (monetary stimulus)
- Obama benefitted from $10 trillion of deficit spending (front-end loaded fiscal stimulus)
- Trump has also deficit spent about $3 trillion (much used to rebuild the military)
- Trump has had the Fed reduce the money supply by about $400 billion
- The Fed has increased interest rates by 1.5 percentage points under Trump
- Trumps has increased GDP growth by about one percentage point and reduced unemployment rates by about 1.2 percentage points despite substantial headwinds from his trade wars with China, Canada and Mexico. He has also expanded average worker’s salaries to over 3% annually. and, finally, started the employment participation rate growing again.

We report. you decide.

Afterwards: Interestingly, the DJIA peak under Bush was 14,000 ... right before the Barney Frank induced sub-prime mortgage crisis. Counting from this high, Obama only experienced the stock market expanding by 28.8%.

Interesting Stat

In President Obama's 8 years in office Median Household Income rose a total of  0.3% ... over  8 years! However, in President Trump's first 18 months in office, Median Household Income has risen 4.0%! See: Investors Business Daily. I wonder why we don't see this statistic on the alphabet TV networks? Will this, plus the tax cuts, plus record low unemployment, plus a soaring stock market, plus very high consumer confidence  ... will  they ever make a difference in the November midterms? My guess is that they will ... independent of Mueller's IEDs.

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

[Trump] Team prepares dramatic cuts, ax to government spending ...

Bust: Massive [Pittsburgh] mall sold for $100 at foreclosure auction

Air Force launching missile-launch warning satellite ...

Puerto Rican terrorist freed by Obama placed 130 bombs across U.S.

California 'accidentially' releases information on 3,500 firearms instructors

CNN: If Trump were killed during inauguration, Obama appointee would be president

Trump asks key Obama counter-terrorism officials to stay on

Trump to immediately sign as many as 200 executive orders

Senate Dems will allow only two Trump nominees to be confirmed by day one

Ash Carter: I don't support commuting Chelsea Manning's sentence

Mnuchin slams Obama's economy: 'The unemployment rate is not real'

Mnuchin wants to INCREASE the size of the IRS ...

Funny Numbers

The federal government is quite punishing to corporations which report inflated figures to their stockholders. In fact, ever since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, CEOs and CFOs must personally sign off on their financial statements under the penalties of personal prosecution. But not so the federal government. Our White House hosers feel that they can manufacture any numbers that suit their political purposes. The most recent example is the inflation of the Obamacare sign-up numbers last Spring by 1.3 million out of 8 million reported ... see: Breitbart Article. This is a 16.2% inflation of this figure ... or a "material" misstatement in corporate terms ... one that might well end the responsible executive in the hoosegow.

And this is not the first time that the Obama administration has used funny numbers to serve their political purposes. Remember how there was a convenient reduction in the unemployment rate right before the 2012 presidential election? See: My Tinfoil Hat. This, in my opinion, was due to the politicizing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This slight-of-hand has oft been repeated when Obama brags about the number of new jobs he has created ... see: Weasel Words. And, as a consequence, I have become suspicious of most of the numbers that our current government publishes ... deficits, Federal Reserve balance sheet numbers (see: Finger on the Scale), and maybe even macro-economic measures may have been compromised.

I wonder how old our president really is?

Flat Line

The United States reported yesterday its first quarter GDP growth at 0.1% … see: My Way News Story. Wow ... a measly 0.1%! This is clearly flat-line economic growth after 4.5 years of mucho-trillions of dollars of fiscal pump-priming by this administration and the unprecedented monetary expansion by our Federal Reserve Bank. This anemic financial news, instead of being reported by banner front-page headlines in the New York Times was relegated to the “Business Day” sub-section of this Obama public relations rag.

Can the media suppress this bad news until after this fall’s elections? Sure … it has a quiver full of Obama’s distracting phony stories to mitigate such voter downsides … the war on women, increasing the minimum wage, rampant racism, the Koch brothers, immigration reform, etc. Yes, the stock market is up substantially since 2009 … primarily due to the Federal Reserve Bank’s easy-money policies. Yes, “reported” unemployment is down to 6.7% … mainly because over three million otherwise-employable adults have dropped out of the work force … see: Christian Science Monitor Story.

It is clear as glass that this administration cares not a twit about economic growth or reducing real unemployment. There are a plethora of levers that they could pull to improve things … meaningful tax reform, oking the Keystone pipeline, more international trade reforms … particularly in the Far East and in Latin America, reducing bureaucratic regulations, reforming entitlements, streamlining government, etc.... none of which seem to be being grabbed.

Actually when one ponders this anemic economic growth, one could easily justify this 0.1% number just with the extravagant spending that taxpayers are footing to keep the Obama clan living in the luxurious style to which they have become accustomed … see: WND Story.

My Tinfoil Hat

Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric), Donald Trump (The Donald), Mort Zuckerman (Editor of U.S. News & World Report, owner of the N.Y. Daily News, and founder of Boston Properties), and most right-wing talk-show hosts believe that the recent favorable 7.8% unemployment rate is very suspicious ... thinking that the data has been somehow rigged.  However, I have not yet seen any of them (including the New York Times in two stories) who can point to a possible reason for this misfeasance ... except for myself (bedecked in my tinfoil hat) among a very few others. 

And this is because I have discovered an Obama political operative who has been running the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) since June 14th of this year and whom I suspect is the reason that the unemployment rate suddenly dropped below 8% ... a big political plus for The Barry one month before the Presidential election ... strangely serendipitous.  Her name is Erica Groshen.  None of the luminaries mentioned above seem to know of this coincidence.  Even a recent ABC story seems to think that the BLS is still under the control of apolitical bureaucrats ... see: ABC News Story.  Nonsense!

In order to show you how far off the reservation I have sidled (excuse me, Elizabeth Warren), let me direct you to two wingnut websites I have uncovered ... see: Freedumb Nation and Net Right Daily (please indulge me and read them both).  Although these sites do seem a little odd, they both give one an idea of how really far left this new head of the BLS seems to drop her Birkenstocks.  And, if you believe that her political bent would not cause her to "persuade" her direct reports to follow her lead to the most bizarre adjustment for BLS unemployment statistics in at least 29 years, then you don't understand "the Chicago way."

A Drop

Just so you know ... the recent unemployment data dump by the Bureau of Labor Statistics which pegged the unemployment rate at 8.1%, a drop from the previous 8.3%, neglects to highlight a few key statistics, viz, the actual number of persons employed, in fact, dropped by 120,000 and the workforce dropped a suspiciously staggering 580,000.  It is the interplay of these two numbers that creates the convenient fiction that the unemployment rate is dropping.  See: CPS Tables and click on the HTML version of the A-1 table under Monthly Household Data.

Employment Leadership

Picture from the Powerline Blog

I just heard Obama brag that his administration has created 4.5 million jobs in the last 29 months and 1.5 million jobs since the beginning of the year.  Balderdash!

As it turns out the U.S. economy has created only 3.2 million net jobs (not 4.5 million) since January of 2010 (a little over 29 months ago) while, at the same time, our population  has grown by 5.5 million ... and 4.4 million people have stopped looking for jobs (left the labor force). 

Year-to-date, these numbers show job growth of 583 thousand (not 1.5 million) while our population has grown by 1.1 milliom and 466 thousand people have left the labor force. 

And just in the last month, these statistics show that the U.S. economy has lost 195 thousand net jobs (NOT growth of 163,000 as widely reported ... quite disturbing) while, at the same time, our population has grown by 199 thousand ... and 348 thousand people have stopped looking for jobs.  And this drop in the number of those seeking jobs is the only way that our current unemployment rate isnot higher than 8.3%.

But even more damning are the numbers since Obama took office (January, 2009).  Since then, the U.S. economy has created only 2.3 million net jobs while, at the same time, our population  has grown by 7.6 million people ... and 6.7 million people have left the labor force.  If the U.S. labor force participation rate was the same today as it was in January, 2009 (65.4%), then our unemployment rate would be a more revealing 10.6%!

As always, I get this data from the CPS Tables and by clicking on the HTML version of the A-1 table under Monthly Household Data.  (If you question the veracity of my above assessments, please go to this site and see for yourself.)

"Lucy

Lucille Ball

you got some splainin' to do" ...  In this case "Lucy" is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  We were greeted this morning with some encouraging employment numbers (see: LA Times Story).  In particular, this nation's unemployment rate has dropped to 8.3%.  As is my wont, I then went to the source data at the Bureau to see what was what (see: CPS Tables and click on the HTML version of the A-1 table under Monthly Household Data).  And what I found was puzzling ... the civilian noninstitutional population (a non-seasonally-adjusted number) increased by almost 1.7 million in the month of January alone.  This compares to an average increase throughout all of 2011 of around 140 thousand per month.  This makes the current figure over 12 times higher than what might be considered normal!  This is certainly an outlying statistical jump and needs to be explained if one is to understand (and maybe even trust) these new good unemployment numbers.

My guess -- perhaps it is the huge jump in foreign nationals entering the U.S. to take jobs not given ... or maybe not even offered to U.S. citizens (see: Numbers USA) and this needs to be accounted for by the Bureau ... and it chose to do so all in the month of January.

And also please note the very large pop in the number of people who have left the labor force in January  ... almost 1.2 million versus an average of 215 thousand per month throughout 2011.  This is up by a factor of almost 6!  I find this too to be somewhat strange.

So, although the reported unemployment numbers do appear to be encouraging for our economic prospects, I am not doing cartwheels quite yet.