The labor force participation rate remained flat. Which based on previous months that's actually a positive.
The one bad thing is the number of hours worked dropped. That means employers are cutting back on hours for their employees. A number of them most likely to stay below the 27 hours per week Obamacare requirements.
Overall not a horrible report. Maybe we're going to get some traction in the coming months.
(05-03-2013 09:47 AM)Redwingtom Wrote: [ -> ]April Jobs Report: U.S. Economy Adds 165,000 Jobs; Unemployment Rate Down To 7.5 Percent
Quote:The job market may not be as weak as it looked just a month ago -- but it is still nowhere near as strong as it could be.
Employers added 165,000 workers to nonfarm payrolls in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday, and unemployment fell to 7.5 percent from 7.6 percent, the lowest since December 2008. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected nonfarm payrolls to rise by 140,000 jobs and unemployment to hold steady at 7.6 percent.
Maybe the most eye-catching part of the report were revisions to prior months: February job growth was ratcheted up to 332,000 from an initial reading of 268,000. And March job growth was revised to 138,000 from 88,000. That means there were another 114,000 jobs in those two months than initially estimated.
Still, after years of sluggish job growth, there are nearly 12 million people unemployed in the U.S. The number of workers on nonfarm payrolls remains nearly 2.6 million shy of the number at the job market's peak, in January 2008, making this the slowest job-market recovery since World War II. At the current pace of job growth, the U.S. economy wouldn't reach full employment until 2021, according to Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
Alright Obama brought us all the way back to the best unemployment since Obama was president..
The big problem with the report, is that the U6 numbers went up another .1 percent. 13.5 to 13.6 (i think that's what I heard on the radio report).
In fact, a lot of the economist I heard talking today are trying to figure out how this spiked the stock market today like it did, due to the U6 number. They said the 7.5% number had some part of it, but shouldn't have spiked it as much as it did
Obviously sequester tanked the economy.
(05-03-2013 10:45 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ]Obviously sequester tanked the economy.
I thought Obama was trying to make the sequester as painful as possible?
Obama's very best monthly unemployment figure is still higher than George Bush's worst month in his 8 years as president.
And it didnt cost the American taxpayers trillions to artificially prop up the economy either.
Something to think about.
(05-04-2013 01:10 AM)RobertN Wrote: [ -> ] (05-03-2013 10:45 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ]Obviously sequester tanked the economy.
I thought Obama was trying to make the sequester as painful as possible?
Disappointed he has not be able to make it harder than he has; certainly has not been for his trying.
Obama has been trying to make *regular people* feel the pain of the sequester, not the elite that are funding him.
Closing the whihouse tours and allowing flights to delay a short bit are visible, painful for regular folks, and wont hurt the wealthy. Obama Supporters
We need to be honest here... for you leftists, a little dose of reality. On the right, a little dose of sanity.
The reason the economy is growing, albeit slowly is because that is what business does. Business grows. Investors seek to make money and by and large, they succeed. A president doesn't make things good and he doesn't make things bad... he can merely make them better or worse. Obama (or Bush if you lefties prefer) probably made things a little better by spending literally trillions more than we had ever spent before... or were even on track to spend under Bush... Trillions... How can that NOT make things better in the short run?
Unfortunately, you need fairly extreme growth in order to recover those trillions... and like it or not, some very specific policies of the Obama administration (or remnants of the Bush administration) have kept us from having that extreme growth. The fact that NFP is 2.6 million people UNDER our peak and the MANY reports that show that there is an ongoing shift from relatively fully employed people and partially employed people, and stagnats (at best) hourly wages.... shows that businesses have often shifted from paying 2 people to work 60 hours a week to paying 4 people to work 30 so they don't have to pay benefits. Great for the unemployment rate... not so great for workers. They may pay slightly more per hour, but they pay much less in total. Why? because rules for things like Obamacare and many of the rules for stimulus spending make this a way for the business to keep making more money.
Obama still hasn't given a plan for paying back the expenses, other than on the backs of the wealthy, which only causes the wealthy to want to avoid long-term committments in the US which lead to lots of growth... A SMART leader would be saying, we need to grow this economy at 3.5-4.5% in order to pay back our spending and put our financial house back in order. In order to get to that 3.5-4.5% growth, I need to enact policies that make it easier for businesses to make more money. In exchange, I'm going to ask them to pay a slightly higher percentage of those gains.... going from 15% to 18% on gains. I don't think they'll mind paying 18% on 4.5% growth as opposed to 15% on 2.5% growth. I'm going to target GROWTH of this economy... and 2.5% isn't enough. I'm also going to lower the top rate on "income" for the wealthy because it is obvious from 40% to 28%... NOT because I want them to pay less, but because I want them to report more. IRS data and a quick snapshot of the tax returns of the wealthy in this country clearly shows that "income" is a very small portion of what they report. That is clearly the result of a tax system that punishes income. They are going to lose some deductions in this process, but they will also no longer have to bear the expense of sheltering income. I believe the net result is that they will shelter less income, which means more revenue for them and more tax revenue for us. People who make lots of money in this country aren't the enemy. They are the engine. We merely need to make sure that as much as possible that they make that money HERE, and not in some foriegn subsidiary or offshore trust. Similarly, we are going to continue to attract investment by foreign companies to build and sell things here, which means jobs here, as opposed to building things "there" and merely using the internet and a shipping company.
The ONLY thing that saves our economy is to cut spending and to increase revenues. If Obama wants to raise taxes, at THIS point, fine. At least tell us what you plan to do so that business can react to it. Holding this gun to their heads for 5 years has hurt the economy. As stupid as I think raising gains taxes to 25% would be, at least businesses would know what the rate was... and grow their businesses.... just not all here... still, mom and pop investors/businesses can't move their shops, so it WOULD positively impact our economy somewhat. Buffett would make hundreds of billions more by rolling more mom and pop shops up into his multinational... and then when we all realize that truth, we can cut the rates back to 20 and recoup some of our losses. As for spending cuts... Sequester as I understand it merely returns this years budgets to last years..... which are almost without exception, much higher than a few years ago. I suspect 3/4 of Americans are living on the same or less than last year, and 50% no more than 3 or 4 years ago... yet that is obviously "too much" for the government to handle. They never HAVE had their budgets not grow, so to subject them to a flat budget is cruel and unusual... and the tour cut and the faa cut are examples of attempts to make the cuts as painful as possible for average Americans as opposed to the government.
(05-04-2013 01:19 PM)Hambone10 Wrote: [ -> ]We need to be honest here... for you leftists, a little dose of reality. On the right, a little dose of sanity.
The reason the economy is growing, albeit slowly is because that is what business does. Business grows. Investors seek to make money and by and large, they succeed. A president doesn't make things good and he doesn't make things bad... he can merely make them better or worse. Obama (or Bush if you lefties prefer) probably made things a little better by spending literally trillions more than we had ever spent before... or were even on track to spend under Bush... Trillions... How can that NOT make things better in the short run?
Unfortunately, you need fairly extreme growth in order to recover those trillions... and like it or not, some very specific policies of the Obama administration (or remnants of the Bush administration) have kept us from having that extreme growth. The fact that NFP is 2.6 million people UNDER our peak and the MANY reports that show that there is an ongoing shift from relatively fully employed people and partially employed people, and stagnats (at best) hourly wages.... shows that businesses have often shifted from paying 2 people to work 60 hours a week to paying 4 people to work 30 so they don't have to pay benefits. Great for the unemployment rate... not so great for workers. They may pay slightly more per hour, but they pay much less in total. Why? because rules for things like Obamacare and many of the rules for stimulus spending make this a way for the business to keep making more money.
Obama still hasn't given a plan for paying back the expenses, other than on the backs of the wealthy, which only causes the wealthy to want to avoid long-term committments in the US which lead to lots of growth... A SMART leader would be saying, we need to grow this economy at 3.5-4.5% in order to pay back our spending and put our financial house back in order. In order to get to that 3.5-4.5% growth, I need to enact policies that make it easier for businesses to make more money. In exchange, I'm going to ask them to pay a slightly higher percentage of those gains.... going from 15% to 18% on gains. I don't think they'll mind paying 18% on 4.5% growth as opposed to 15% on 2.5% growth. I'm going to target GROWTH of this economy... and 2.5% isn't enough. I'm also going to lower the top rate on "income" for the wealthy because it is obvious from 40% to 28%... NOT because I want them to pay less, but because I want them to report more. IRS data and a quick snapshot of the tax returns of the wealthy in this country clearly shows that "income" is a very small portion of what they report. That is clearly the result of a tax system that punishes income. They are going to lose some deductions in this process, but they will also no longer have to bear the expense of sheltering income. I believe the net result is that they will shelter less income, which means more revenue for them and more tax revenue for us. People who make lots of money in this country aren't the enemy. They are the engine. We merely need to make sure that as much as possible that they make that money HERE, and not in some foriegn subsidiary or offshore trust. Similarly, we are going to continue to attract investment by foreign companies to build and sell things here, which means jobs here, as opposed to building things "there" and merely using the internet and a shipping company.
The ONLY thing that saves our economy is to cut spending and to increase revenues. If Obama wants to raise taxes, at THIS point, fine. At least tell us what you plan to do so that business can react to it. Holding this gun to their heads for 5 years has hurt the economy. As stupid as I think raising gains taxes to 25% would be, at least businesses would know what the rate was... and grow their businesses.... just not all here... still, mom and pop investors/businesses can't move their shops, so it WOULD positively impact our economy somewhat. Buffett would make hundreds of billions more by rolling more mom and pop shops up into his multinational... and then when we all realize that truth, we can cut the rates back to 20 and recoup some of our losses. As for spending cuts... Sequester as I understand it merely returns this years budgets to last years..... which are almost without exception, much higher than a few years ago. I suspect 3/4 of Americans are living on the same or less than last year, and 50% no more than 3 or 4 years ago... yet that is obviously "too much" for the government to handle. They never HAVE had their budgets not grow, so to subject them to a flat budget is cruel and unusual... and the tour cut and the faa cut are examples of attempts to make the cuts as painful as possible for average Americans as opposed to the government.
You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
(05-04-2013 05:49 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
The military budget is not $1 trillion. If we eliminated the military entirely, it wouldn't balance the budget.
(05-04-2013 05:54 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:49 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
The military budget is not $1 trillion. If we eliminated the military entirely, it wouldn't balance the budget.
And it would create a HUGE unemployment problem. Businesses worldwide would collapse, cities and towns would go broke.
(05-04-2013 05:55 PM)smn1256 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:54 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:49 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
The military budget is not $1 trillion. If we eliminated the military entirely, it wouldn't balance the budget.
And it would create a HUGE unemployment problem. Businesses worldwide would collapse, cities and towns would go broke.
So basically a different form of government welfare. Cool.
(05-04-2013 05:58 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:55 PM)smn1256 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:54 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:49 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
The military budget is not $1 trillion. If we eliminated the military entirely, it wouldn't balance the budget.
And it would create a HUGE unemployment problem. Businesses worldwide would collapse, cities and towns would go broke.
So basically a different form of government welfare. Cool.
No. This is actually a good example of how government spending can help the economy bit only because we need a military. We actually do need a lot of government services and that is what out taxes are for.
(05-04-2013 06:02 PM)smn1256 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:58 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:55 PM)smn1256 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:54 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: [ -> ] (05-04-2013 05:49 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]You know, we could get plenty of money from our 1 trillion dollar military budget.
The military budget is not $1 trillion. If we eliminated the military entirely, it wouldn't balance the budget.
And it would create a HUGE unemployment problem. Businesses worldwide would collapse, cities and towns would go broke.
So basically a different form of government welfare. Cool.
No. This is actually a good example of how government spending can help the economy bit only because we need a military. We actually do need a lot of government services and that is what out taxes are for.
We don't need a trillion dollars in spending and decade long wars. The US accounts for 45% of the world's military expenditures. That's straight up overkill. We've built up an entire sector of the economy that relies on war and our taxes. How does it help the rest of the economy? We're setting up a ton of businesses to fail once there isn't a war to fight. It's not a sustainable way of operating. What are we going to do with all of the crap that is left over or all of the soldiers when they get back? It's such an insane amount of waste.
(05-04-2013 06:04 PM)dmacfour Wrote: [ -> ]We don't need a trillion dollars in spending and decade long wars. The US accounts for 45% of the world's military expenditures. That's straight up overkill.
Agree totally on the decade long wars. Two years max. Go in, kill everybody who needs to be killed, blow up everything that needs to be blown up, come home--after making sure that whoever is left in power understands that we will do the same to him if he doesn't behave. Never fight a war you don't intend to win.
As for the trillion dollars, we don't spend a trillion on defense. A lot less than that. And as for the comparison with the rest of the world, there are entirely valid reasons why we need to spend more than anyone else. But there are also some significant savings that could be realized.