October 4, 2011

U.S. Job Creation Falls Back Further in September

Midwest sees the largest decline since August

by Lymari Morales

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. job creation continues to steadily abate, reversing the upward trend seen since the start of 2010. The nation's Job Creation Index score slid to +12 in September, marking the third straight month of decline, but remains up slightly from +9 a year ago.

Gallup's September Job Creation Index score of +12 reflects the 31% of employed Americans nationwide who say their employer is hiring new workers and expanding the size of its workforce minus the 19% who say their employer is letting workers go and reducing the size of its workforce.

Hiring has exceeded firing every month since February 2010, reflecting significant improvement compared with late 2008 through the start of 2010, when job contraction exceeded or rivaled job creation. Still, the nation's current Job Creation Index score is again less than half of what it was (+26) when Gallup began tracking job creation daily in January 2008.

Midwest Leads Decline

The Midwest saw the biggest decline from August to September, down five percentage points to +14. It now ties the South for the best job creation conditions in the nation. Conversely, the West improved its overall index score to +12. The East still lags behind the nation with an overall score of +9.

Implications

While Gallup's monthly trend shows a clear downward pattern, reports do vary slightly from week to week. The U.S. Department of Labor last week reported a decline in new jobless claims for the week ending Sept. 24, and Gallup's Job Creation Index also found its comparable week to be the best week of the month. Similarly, the government and the Gallup measure found the comparable week ending Sept. 10-11 to be the worst week of the month, with the most new jobless claims and the lowest weekly Job Creation Index score.

An important distinction is that the government's measure is seasonally adjusted, and the Labor Department has acknowledged challenges with its adjustments this year. Gallup's real-time measure based on employee reports without seasonal adjustment does suggest different seasonal dynamics this year. The U.S. job creation situation appears to be weakening during the transition from summer into fall, whereas during the past two years, it was steady or improving. In 2008, however, the situation was getting worse at this time of year, and much more rapidly so, as the nation experienced recession.

Employers may be holding back on hiring partly because of the growing economic pessimism and recent declines on Wall Street and the ongoing financial challenges facing the eurozone. A sustained reversal of the job creation gains seen earlier in the year would of course be a troubling setback for the U.S. economy's recovery -- and for the millions of Americans still seeking the full-time "good jobs" that only sustained job creation can provide.

Gallup.com reports results from these indexes in daily, weekly, and monthly averages and in Gallup.com stories. Complete trend data are always available to view and export in the following charts:

Daily: Employment, Economic Confidence and Job Creation,Consumer Spending
Weekly: Employment, Economic Confidence, Job Creation,Consumer Spending

Read more about Gallup's economic measures.

View our economic release schedule.

Survey Methods

For Gallup Daily tracking, Gallup interviews approximately 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older, each day. The Gallup Job Creation Index results are based on a random sample of approximately 500 current full- and part-time employees each day.

National results for September are based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews with 16,604 employees conducted Sept. 1-30, 2011. For this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point. Regional results for September are based on interviews totaling more than 3,000 in each region. For each total regional sample, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample includes a minimum quota of 400 cell phone respondents and 600 landline respondents per 1,000 national adults, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cell phone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2010 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

For more details on Gallup's polling methodology, visit www.gallup.com.

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With Obama jobs bill near dead, WH plans...

• Posted on Monday, October 3, 2011

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With Obama jobs bill near dead, White House plans fall push for passage

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By Steven Thomma and David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — With Republicans killing prospects for a comprehensive jobs bill, the White House is planning a fall strategy it hopes will wrangle enough GOP votes for a package some economists say would add as many as 1.9 million jobs to a sagging economy — at least temporarily.

The White House's new 60-day legislative-political strategy is designed to pressure Republicans in Obama-friendly districts to support his proposed $447 billion jobs bill and accompanying tax increases — or face blame at home heading into the 2012 election year.

To drive the strategy, Obama will go on the road more this fall, presumably to many of those Republican districts, rather than sitting at a negotiating table in Washington as he did this summer for weeks with congressional Republicans.

The need for a Plan B was evident Monday as House Republicans said flatly that they won't approve the entire jobs bill as Obama has demanded.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., told reporters the entire package is dead in the House. The measure includes extension and expansion of a one-year payroll tax cut, extension of unemployment benefits, and cash for public works projects.

"The president continues to say, 'Pass my bill in its entirety,'" Cantor said. "The outset, the all-or-nothing approach is just unacceptable."

Obama responded by asking anew for a vote on the entire plan by the end of October. "It's been several weeks now since I sent up the American Jobs Act," Obama said. "I want it back. I'm ready to sign it."

There is no chance of that, and the White House knows it.

The Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to marshal all of its Democrats let alone the added Republicans it would need to pass the bill, and the Democrats in the House couldn't pass it unless they could lure away a bloc of Republicans.

Thus, senior administration officials outlined their plan to use October and November to bear down on 61 House Republicans from districts that voted for Obama in 2008, 14 of which also voted for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. They'll also focus on some Senate Republicans.

The White House hopes to isolate the members, threatening to drive a wedge between them and their national party leadership.

In a good-cop, bad-cop approach, the strategy will at first stress the local benefits of the jobs bill, such as local bridge or highway work as Obama talked about during a recent visit to Ohio.

Backing that up, it then would follow with the threat of blaming recalcitrant Republicans not just for failing to pass a bill to help boost the economy, but also for failing to vote for the package that would extend tax cuts and jobless benefits.

Nationally, the White House will argue that failure to act would mean tax increases for 102 million Americans on Jan. 1, and the cutoff of unemployment checks for millions more.

Locally, it will be armed with lists showing precisely how many people would face tax increases or the loss of jobless benefits in each district or state.

Administration officials did not lay out the president's travel plans for the next 60 days. But the Democratic campaign officials identified the 61 Republican House districts in such states as California, Florida, Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.

The White House strategy assumes that Obama's 2008 victory in those districts signals his enduring appeal there. Administration officials say Obama's past win in those districts means there are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents in those districts, voters who could be drawn back to the polls with Obama once again on the ballot in 2012.

However, Republicans could argue that their wins, particularly by the freshmen who won their seats in the anti-Obama landslide of 2010, makes them closer to the will of the people — and immune to Obama's political pressure.

Obama travels Tuesday to Texas, but not to one of the two districts held by Republicans that the White House considers vulnerable. Instead, Obama will visit the district of Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who is co-chairman of the congressional "supercommittee" weighing ways to cut the federal budget deficit.

Although Majority Leader Cantor declared Monday that the president's jobs bill is dead as a package, insiders believe it's possible Congress still could enact parts of it. Obama would sign individual parts, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday, though he would press Republicans to explain why they wouldn't pass other parts.

Some of those parts also could help boost jobs, at least temporarily.

Economist Mark Zandi, who estimated the entire package would create 1.9 million jobs in 2012, said that extending the payroll tax cut alone would create 750,000 jobs.

"Certainly it's part of the discussion," Cantor said of the payroll tax cut. Beyond that, he signaled no interest in taking on anything else from Obama's jobs bill and instead urged the president to work with Republicans on their jobs proposals.

"We've seen enough of the divide," Cantor said. "If nothing else, we should certainly focus on trying to put some wins on the board."

He listed a series of steps where he thought there was common ground, including repeal of a 3 percent withholding tax on government contracts, scheduled to take effect in 2013, and approval of trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama.

List of 61 Republican members in districts carried by Obama in 2008

Dan Lungren (CA-03)

Elton Gallegly (CA-24)

Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (CA-25)

David Dreier (CA-26)

Ken Calvert (CA-44)

Mary Bono Mack (CA-45)

John Campbell (CA-48)

Brian Bilbray (CA-50)

Daniel Webster (FL-08)

Bill Young (FL-10)

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18)

(a) Allen West (FL-22)

Peter Roskam (IL-06)

Joe Walsh (IL-08)

(a) Robert Dold (IL-10)

Adam Kinzinger (IL-11)

Judy Biggert (IL-13)

Randy Hultgren (IL-14)

Donald A. Manzullo (IL-16)

(a) Bobby Schilling (IL-17)

Tom Latham (IA-04)

Kevin Yoder (KS-03)

Dan Benishek (MI-01)

Dave Camp (MI-04)

Fred Upton (MI-06)

Tim Walberg (MI-07)

Mike Rogers (MI-08)

Thad McCotter (MI-11)

Erik Paulsen (MN-03)

(a) Chip Cravaack (MN-08)

Lee Terry (NE-02)

Joe Heck (NV-03)

Frank Guinta (NH-01)

(a) Charles Bass (NH-02)

Frank LoBiondo (NJ-02)

Jon Runyan (NJ-03)

Leonard Lance (NJ-07)

Nan Hayworth (NY-19)

Chris Gibson (NY-20)

Richard L. Hanna (NY-24)

(a) Ann Marie Buerkle (NY-25)

Renee Ellmers (NC-02)

Steve Chabot (OH-01)

Patrick J. Tiberi (OH-12)

(a) Steve Stivers (OH-15)

(a) Jim Gerlach (PA-06)

(a) Pat Meehan (PA-07)

(a) Mike Fitzpatrick (PA-08)

(a) Lou Barletta (PA-11)

(a) Charles Dent (PA-15)

Quico Canseco (TX-23)

Blake Farenthold (TX-27)

Scott Rigell (VA-02)

Randy Forbes (VA-04)

Frank Wolf (VA-10)

Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA-03)

(a) Dave Reichert (WA-08)

Paul Ryan (WI-01)

Thomas E. Petri (WI-06)

(a) Sean Duffy (WI-07)

Reid Ribble (WI-08)

(a) District was also carried by John Kerry in 2004.

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McClatchy Newspapers 2011

Growing list of health care lies plagues president’s overhaul

WOLF: Bending Obamacare’s honesty curve downward

Growing list of health care lies plagues president’s overhaul

173 Comments and 132 Reactions|ShareTweet|Email|Print|

By Dr. Milton R. Wolf

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The Washington Times

Friday, September 30, 2011

Illustration: Hell in a handbasket by Greg Groesch for The Washington Times

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The Obamacare house of cards is crumbling before our eyes. The Obama administration’s signature piece of legislation brings a sixth of the U.S. economy under federal control, and the writing is on the wall: Obamacare will collapse under the weight of its own false promises. The only mystery left is whether we will allow America to go down with it.

Remember when President Obama claimed over and over again that his health care plan would “bend the cost curve downward”? He even declared resolutely that he would not otherwise sign the bill. Well, add that to the growing list of Obamacare lies.

This is going to be a bumpy flight.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation recently released the results of a survey that shakes the president’s health care law right down to its core. Health insurance premiums rose in 2011 to more than $15,000 per family for the first time in American history. Not surprisingly, Obamacare itself is to blame for much of the increase. The forced requirement to include adult “children” on their parents’ insurance up to the age of 26, as just one example, contributed to 20 percent of the increase.

Before Obamacare, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) projected annual health care spending would increase an average of 6.1 percent per year over the next decade. Despite the promises, after Obamacare passed, CMS recalculated its projections upward to 6.3 percent. Huh? Now the Kaiser survey shows that the actual results for the first year amounted to a 9 percent increase. Mr. Obama bent the cost curve all right - upward.

Are the increased costs justified, even if it does break the president’s cost-curve promise because, after all, Obamacare finally was going to provide insurance for 46 million uninsured people? Brace yourself. According to Gallup, the percentage of adults in America without health insurance has increased since Mr. Obama took office and since he signed Obamacare into law.

Please return your seat backs and tray tables to their full upright position. We are hitting some major turbulence now.

OK, so health care costs are going up because of Obamacare, and more adults are uninsured since it began - mostly because of Obamanomics (that’s another story) - but at least Mr. Obama promised it would reduce the deficit, right? Well, that was then, and this is now. Administration officials are quietly abandoning the so-called CLASS Act portion of Obamacare, supposedly meant to provide long-term elderly care. In reality, this was the mother of all accounting gimmicks, which counted 10 years of tax revenues but just five years of expenditures to give a false sense of fiscal sanity. Democratic senator and Obamacare supporter Kent Conrad of North Dakota called this “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” Absent the accounting gimmicks, the Congressional Budget Office now acknowledges that Obamacare actually increases the national deficit by $540 billion over the next 10 years.

We have just lost cabin pressure.

Of course, while each of these three lies is damning in its own right, they barely scratch the surface of the Obamacare duplicity. And let me be clear: These are lies. There’s normally something generous about our human nature that seeks to avoid that word - lies - but we are in an existential crisis in America, and it demands blunt and precise language. We did not get here because of simple distortions or exaggerations or even misrepresentations. Obamacare is the product of statements known by their makers to be untrue and meant to deceive - lies.

Mr. Obama promised on at least eight occasions that he would open his health care hearings to the public. Invite the C-SPAN cameras in, he said, so Americans would know who’s on their side. C-SPAN Chief Executive Brian Lamb said the network certainly would have covered the meetings, but the president “never asked us.”

The Obamacare lies are mounting: You could keep your current insurance. You could keep your doctor. The plan would cost less than a trillion dollars. Medicare would be protected. There would be no health care rationing. No one earning less than $250,000 per year would see an increase in his taxes. Tax credits would alleviate the burdens placed on small businesses. The plan would create 4 million new jobs, 400,000 almost immediately. Americans would love Obamacare once they saw what was in it.

The crumbling of Obamacare is now so unmistakable that its supporters have become the dog that didn’t bark. It’s difficult to find anyone outside the administration who is still willing to defend it publicly.

Calling a lie a lie is difficult for some people, but I cannot apologize for being blunt when America’s future is at stake on such a serious matter. At best, the only alternative is what “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno recently said of the president: “I can’t figure out if he’s the kind of guy who makes infomercials or the kind of guy who falls for infomercials.”

Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is President Obama’s cousin. He blogs at MiltonWolf.com.

The Donkey Whisperer

Posted by: MacAoidh on Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 11:30

Tagged with: 2012    Humor

Roger Williams is running for Congress in Texas, and he’s one of the good guys.

He’s also got a sense of humor. But Democrats probably won’t like him.

Tagged with: 2012    Humor

The Obama Presidency - By The Numbers

October 01, 2011 The Obama Presidency - By The Numbers [John E.] My latest infographic has "dropped" (that's what the kids say, right?). This is my second stab at creating one; the first was a timeline of theSolyndra scandal. In this infographic, I took a look at various statements and promises made by Barack Obama (and a few others) during both the 2008 campaign and early on in his Presidency. These statements were then set against current statistics and those from inauguration day or 2008 for annual stats. Open it up below the fold. I tried to keep the width down to avoid blowing up the blog. The larger version is available here. Feel free to embed it on your own website (just toss my Flickr page a link, please). Posted by John E.