Hope and Change: More Jobs to Disappear

Oh my….:

Disappointing Jobs – While everyone seems to debating what the non-farm payroll numb will be Friday, a few are looking toward the annual revisions in the much debated Birth/Death model.
As you probably recall, it does not refer to the birth or death of humans. The badly named model refers to the birth and death of businesses. Each January the BLS revises the number, usually vaporizing thousands of jobs.
We were going to try and calculate the likely revision, but our sharp-eyed friend over at Bloomberg, Rich Yamarone, as usual, beat us to it. Here’s what he wrote in his Notepad column recently:
The Net Birth/Death (NBD) statistic adjustment – an adjustment the BLS uses to account for job creation or loss with respect to births and deaths of businesses – is always the weakest during January. Over the last five years the NBD for January has averaged -335k. [January 2011: -339k, January 2010: -427k, January2009: -356k, January 2008: -378k, January2007: -175k.]
So, if past is prologue, we could see three or four hundred thousand jobs vanish. Nothing like a dependable indicator.
via Art Cashin Explains Why Several Hundred Thousand Jobs Are About To “Vaporize” | ZeroHedge.

Between this and the new scandal involving Eric Holder, this President is screwed.

Welcome to the depression: CBO says Unemployment actually at 10%

Makes you want to run right out and vote for Democrat, no? 😛

Via Drudge:

What do the NAR, Consumer Confidence and CBO forecasts have in common? If you said, “they are all completely worthless” you are absolutely correct. Alas, the market needs to “trade” off numbers, which is why the just released CBO numbers apparently are important… And the fact that the CBO predicted negative $2.5 trillion in net debt by 2011 back in 2011 is largely ignored. Anyway, here are some of the highlights.
2012 Deficit: $1.1 trillion; 2013 Deficit: $0.6 – yes, we are cackling like mad too…
Unemployment to remain above 8% in 2012 and 2013; will be around 7% by end of 2015; to drop to 5.25% by end of 2022.
This forecast is utterly idiotic and is completely unattainable unless the US workforce drops to all time lows and the US economy generates 300,000 jobs a month for 10 years
Needless to say, CBO assumes the best of all worlds in this meaningless forecast
But here is the kicker: “Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1¼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent” translation: CBO just admitted that the BLS numbers are bogus and real unemployment is 10%. Thank you
via Latest Congressional Budget Outlook For 2012-2022 Released, Says Real Unemployment Rate Is 10% | ZeroHedge.

Welcome to the real world folks! I could write about this; but I already have here.

A very nice article on the decline of the left

This comes via InstaPundit.

An article by Walter Russell Mead in the American Interest on decline of liberalism in America; some highlights:

“The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive. Our real choice, however, is not between blue or pre-blue. We can’t get back to the 1890s or 1920s any more than we can go back to the 1950s and 1960s. We may not yet be able to imagine what a post-blue future looks like, but that is what we will have to build. . . . There are a lot of reasons to be nostalgic for the old days (especially for the white males who were, far and away, the biggest beneficiaries of the old system), but there are also good reasons to bid the blue model good riddance.”

Please, go read the rest of that; because in a sense, this article says much of what I have written in the past on my old blog. Basically, that the left went off the rails years ago; along with organized labor, when they shifted from offense to defense. Since then, they have gotten worse and worse. A perfect example was in 2008, that whole thing with Hillary and Obama was a perfect manifestation of the class warfare between Man and Woman, Black and White; it all got to be a bit too much for me. Which is why I left them.

The sad thing is, the left, as it were, got even crazier after Obama was elected. It was as if the arrogance of the left went through the roof; they had the media, the white house, congress —- everything — and what did Obama do with all that favoritism? He blew it! I believe the grassroots left knows they were played; the establishment left does not really care, they are getting paychecks; but the people I know, the bloggers, are not happy.

Which brings me to my last point; I really wish this process between Newt and Romney would finally end and the Republican Party would get behind one of them. This whole populist versus establishment fighting is wearing very thin with me. It has nuances of the left’s class warfare; which I really do not get into at all. Do not misunderstand me here; I am all for airing someones dirty laundry and misdeeds, but to wrap it up in a package that the left would approve of, is not a way to fight a battle.

In other words; Florida’s primary cannot come quick enough!

Mitt Romney fires a shot across Newt Gingrich’s bow

Looks like Mittens is feeling the heat, perhaps from the flip flops and/or because of the recent polls and is firing back.

ORMOND BEACH, Fla. — Mitt Romney landed here Sunday with a simple message: Newt Gingrich is a failure and a fraud. And a disgrace. And a hapless showman.
Standing under a brilliant orange Florida sunset, Romney delivered his longest sustained critique of the South Carolina primary winner to date — ticking through a list as if he were reading off Gingrich’s Wikipedia page, and undercutting each item as he got to it.
“Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader,” the former Massachusetts governor said. “He was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. And at the end of four years, it was proven that he was a failed leader and he had to resign in disgrace. I don’t know whether you knew that, he actually resigned after four years, in disgrace.
Romney continued: “He was investigated over an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that and then his fellow Republicans, 88 percent of his Republicans voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich. He has not had a record of successful leadership.”
Then Romney got into Gingrich’s post-congressional career.
“Over the last 15 years since he left the House, he talks about great bold movements and ideas,” he told the crowd of several hundred people gathered at a building materials company here. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington.
via Mitt Romney: Newt Gingrich is a ‘failed leader,’ ‘disgrace’ – Reid J. Epstein – POLITICO.com.

To be clear, Newt Gingrich is not a saint and as Geller put it, “He is a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our Son-of-a-bitch.” I know that personally I would rather vote for someone like Newt and hold my nose, than to vote for some idiot racist Mormon who worked for a Latin-American financed company that acted as corporate raiders. I am sorry, but that is simply Anti-American; the very idea that an American would sit at a table with Latin Americans to devise a plan to destroy American businesses is absolutely asinine and for this Mitt Romney should be held accountable. However, because Fox News and others are in the tank for that creep, you will not hear a word about it and that my friends is the tragic thing about corporate media.

So, yes, you can put me in the “anyone but Mitt Romney” category.

Obama’s World? — Fines for Bio fuel that does not exist is stupid, says… The New York Times?!?!

When the Obama lead Government loses the New York Times, something is horribly wrong:

WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.
But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.
Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.
The law, aimed at reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, its reliance on oil imported from hostile places and the export of dollars to pay for it, includes provisions to increase the efficiency of vehicles as well as incorporate renewable energy sources into gasoline and diesel.
It requires the use of three alternative fuels: car and truck fuel made from cellulose, diesel fuel made from biomass and fuel made from biological materials but with a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Only the cellulosic fuel is commercially unavailable. As for meeting the quotas in the other categories, the refiners will not close their books until February and are not sure what will happen.
The goal set by the law for vehicle fuel from cellulose was 250 million gallons for 2011 and 500 million gallons for 2012. (These are small numbers relative to the American fuel market; the E.P.A. estimates that gasoline sales in 2012 will amount to about 135 billion gallons, and highway diesel, about 51 billion gallons.)
Even advocates of renewable fuel acknowledge that the refiners are at least partly correct in complaining about the penalties — Via NYT: Companies Face Fines for Not Using Unavailable Biofuel – NYTimes.com

It is very obvious that the attempt to inject politics into our economy has failed. This means vote different in 2012.

Others: National Review, The Enterprise Blog, Weasel Zippers, The Volokh Conspiracy, Doug Ross and The Jawa Report

Unemployment down to 8.5 percent

Good, but not great:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 in December, and the unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent, continued to trend down, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in transportation and warehousing, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and mining. — Via Employment Situation Summary

Ed Morrissey Notes:

There are a few interesting points to note. Even though the rate of initial weekly jobless claims has declined over the last few weeks, ther has been an increase of 150,000 people unemployed for five weeks or less. The numbers declined slightly in all other time frames, but that’s something to watch. The civilian population participation rate hasn’t changed at all from the 64.0% of last month, which remains the lowest level since the Reagan years and which keeps the jobless rate artificially low. The civilian labor force — all the employed and all those seeking employment — actually declined by 50,000 people since November. However, the U-6 measure of “real” unemployment dropped from 15.6% in November to 15.2% in December, which is the lowest in three years.
It’s a pretty good but not spectacular result. In order to gain jobs, we have to net more than 125,000 jobs added each month. At this rate, it would take 40 months to add 3 million jobs over and above population growth. I’d rather go in that direction than the opposite, but we need a lot more robust job creation than this to get people back to work.

Before I give my thoughts, you must remember this; I live here in Michigan, just outside of Detroit. The Detroit area, along with the rest of the State has suffered under a one-State recession that started much before the big recession that hit the rest of America. Now having said all of that, I say this. All of these numbers mean nothing. It is nothing more than window dressing; at least to me anyhow. I have not had a job now in six years — other than the meager Ad profit that I managed to squeeze out of my old blog. I hope that I will be able to continue that here with this blog. Yes, I have a “small Business“the emphases on small! 😛 😉 😀 😆

What happened was this; I took $120.00 out of my Christmas money and I bought a nice reseller-hosting package. I hope that I can sell some shared hosting to some people. If I sell a few packages and whip out a couple design jobs for a few guys over on Blogger, who want to get off there; and I happen to make my $120.00 back, I will be happy. The rest is just happy profit. I am not looking to become rich on this little venture. I just would like to make a little money. If it gets insanely busy — I will do my duty and go file the paperwork for a business. (Yes, Liberals, I will pay my taxes, if I make enough warrant paying any!)

It is not that I really do not want to work for someone else — I would love to. However, as any small business owner knows, it is somewhat hard to hire anyone at all. When you have an idiot Government breathing down your shirt collar and keeping you from making any profit.

Another little side note; as the son of a UAW member and GM retiree and a member of a middle class family — it feels so weird to be writing from the standpoint of an actual small business owner. I mean, I am not in an office and wearing a suit. However, I am offering a service to people. I do not know how good I will do in the business. However, that is the beauty of a business; it is a real risk. Sometimes, between you and I — risk can be a bit scary. Worried