Statistics for first-time jobless claims came out on Thursday and it was good news if you didn’t reside in the White House or work on Wall Street. Layoffs posted their smallest number since the 2007 recession began.
Hurray! Er, maybe not.
“The number of applications for unemployment insurance payments declined by 15,000 to 320,000 in the week ended Aug. 10,” reports BusinessWeek, “the fewest since October 2007, from a revised 335,000, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 44 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for 335,000. Another report showed manufacturing in the New York region expanded at a slower-than-expected pace in August.”
Notwithstanding the slow pace of manufacturing in New York, the unemployment report tends to show that business conditions have stabilized. One would expect that at this point in a recovery companies would be hiring.
But of course they are not.
The number of real, full-time jobs being created still remains a dog.
While layoffs are less common, the number of new jobs created has a lot in common with that little prize the neighbor’s dog left on your lawn-- both numerically and olfactorily.
The only explanation behind the dearth of job creation is that the health of the business community cannot overcome the distemper of the White House.
The biggest of the distempers of course is Obamacare. But Obamacare isn’t the only one.
Budgets, debt ceilings, tax policy are all up in the air. And they will likely stay that way until after the midterm elections in 2014.
As a result, the stock market sold off, in what’s been one of the most widely-anticipated corrections in recent memory. Instead of a Recovery Summer, we’ve had a Summer-of-waiting-for-the-market-to-digest-the-next-round-of-bad-news-disguised-as-good-news summer.
Now that the markets will have to rely on something like real economic value-- rather than non-stop money printing-- things aren’t looking quite rosy on the Street.
Not coincidentally, Reuters reported that on Thursday “U.S. stocks had the biggest one-day percentage drop since late June on Thursday in higher-than-average trading volume after poor results and outlooks from Dow components Wal-Mart and Cisco.”
What was really behind the sell-off however was the reduced number of layoffs. Fewer layoffs mean that Fed will have a harder and harder time running up bills on the national credit card.
Of course that isn’t going to stop the mainstream media from reporting that the reason why companies aren’t hiring is because the Republican Congress just won’t let them.
But the Liberals in the media can't have it both ways. They can't on the one hand blame Congress for the terrible state of the economy. And then on the other hand give credit to Obama for the wonderful state of the economy.
But they can try.
“The Democrats’ campaign arm in the House released a new round of online ads this week linking 19 of their top GOP targets to comments Mr. Boehner made over the weekend in an interview with ‘Face the Nation’ on CBS,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The attacks represent the Democrats’ latest attempt to blame Republicans for the gridlock in Washington. The latest ad includes clips from various news broadcasts lamenting congressional inaction.” [Editor’s emphasis]
Gee, those clips don’t seem like a coordinated attack from the media. The U.S. media?
Congress should issue subpoenas to media outlets to find out if any coordination with the White House was behind the sudden outburst and shouts of “Gridlock! Gridlock!”
Seriously; Congress has the power, they should do something to dissuade the media from taking sides.
Let’s coordinate ads showing media liberals screaming about First Amendment rights in front of Congress and contrast it with the lame response they showed when the White House spied on them.
After all these are the same left-leaning media nut jobs that are now reporting that the 
Tsarnaev brothers were really right-wing Nazis in disguise. Ha, ha! It’s quite obvious from looking at a picture of the elder Tsarnaev brother that he’s a poster child for the Aryan master race.
And that’s why, for Obama at least, this joblessness report is very bad news.
It tends to undermine his demand for immediate, expensive and ridiculous spending initiatives to support jobs aided and abetted by the media.
Increasingly White House, Democrat and media hysteria is looking like White House, Democrat and media hysteria.
The report also tends to show what we already know: outside of a world war, the government cannot force of job creation in this country.
But don’t tell Bo.
If he ever figured that out we probably have a world war within a week.
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