The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
Thursday, February 5, 2015
More from Gallup's CEO about unemployment
A couple of days ago I wrote about what Gallup calls 'The Big Lie': official unemployment statistics. Here's Gallup's CEO expanding on those remarks. It's well worth watching.
My own research, such as it is, comes up with an even bigger numbers. It's really hard to nail things down because there are a lot of people who are working multiple part time jobs, two is pretty common, three not all that uncommon. He covered it more closely in the interview, we have a number of things going on. One in the decline in new job growth relative to population growth, another is the decrease in pay and benefits at typical middle class income levels 30-90k, also some significant losses in the 90-200k range. That's for full time jobs, existing and new.
Then you have the conversion of private to public - which means you've turned a tax payer into a tax consumer. And yes public employee's pay taxes, but since their entire compensation package is payed for by taxes what you're really seeing is a delayed discount on compensation.
You have a steady increase in regulatory obstruction to new business, increases in regulatory costs. And you have family costs extending for much longer stretches as you're collage mis-educated child stays at home for an additional 10 years.
We're not feeling the recovery because that has been NO recovery. The stock market is NOT the economy. If you look at revenue growth you'll find virtually no correlation to stock price growth for most publicly traded companies. That's because the "stimulus spending" wasn't ever intended to stimulate anything except private already wealthy individuals, people still aren't buying because two part time jobs is hard enough, and actual disposable income requires three for the average collage grad now. And all that quantitative easing has been captured by banks by speculating in the stock market. Increasing a stocks prices does nothing for a corporations growth, unless they can afford to sell owned stock to raise cash for expansion - (which they don't) what they do is lay off employee's to make the books look good.
The fed has printed more money in the last 8 years than in the preceding 95 years. Most of that money never got to where the fed "claimed" it was intended, hence the negative growth in small business startups. - when they finally have to move off zero interest, all that inflation that has been pent up by banks investing in wall street rather than small business is going to hit and it's going to suck. Keep in mind, the "basket of goods" they use to calculate inflation consist entirely of items that are elastic to demand - the companies selling them can't raise the prices because sales will drop even faster. It does' include the things that a person or family actually need to survive.
It's imploding like a scene shot at 10,000 fps - ever so slowly, but it's imploding all the same.
My own research, such as it is, comes up with an even bigger numbers. It's really hard to nail things down because there are a lot of people who are working multiple part time jobs, two is pretty common, three not all that uncommon.
ReplyDeleteHe covered it more closely in the interview, we have a number of things going on. One in the decline in new job growth relative to population growth, another is the decrease in pay and benefits at typical middle class income levels 30-90k, also some significant losses in the 90-200k range. That's for full time jobs, existing and new.
Then you have the conversion of private to public - which means you've turned a tax payer into a tax consumer. And yes public employee's pay taxes, but since their entire compensation package is payed for by taxes what you're really seeing is a delayed discount on compensation.
You have a steady increase in regulatory obstruction to new business, increases in regulatory costs. And you have family costs extending for much longer stretches as you're collage mis-educated child stays at home for an additional 10 years.
We're not feeling the recovery because that has been NO recovery. The stock market is NOT the economy. If you look at revenue growth you'll find virtually no correlation to stock price growth for most publicly traded companies.
That's because the "stimulus spending" wasn't ever intended to stimulate anything except private already wealthy individuals, people still aren't buying because two part time jobs is hard enough, and actual disposable income requires three for the average collage grad now. And all that quantitative easing has been captured by banks by speculating in the stock market. Increasing a stocks prices does nothing for a corporations growth, unless they can afford to sell owned stock to raise cash for expansion - (which they don't) what they do is lay off employee's to make the books look good.
The fed has printed more money in the last 8 years than in the preceding 95 years. Most of that money never got to where the fed "claimed" it was intended, hence the negative growth in small business startups. - when they finally have to move off zero interest, all that inflation that has been pent up by banks investing in wall street rather than small business is going to hit and it's going to suck. Keep in mind, the "basket of goods" they use to calculate inflation consist entirely of items that are elastic to demand - the companies selling them can't raise the prices because sales will drop even faster. It does' include the things that a person or family actually need to survive.
It's imploding like a scene shot at 10,000 fps - ever so slowly, but it's imploding all the same.
Quote: "you're collage mis-educated".
ReplyDeleteYep.