"One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing--not one cent--in 2009" -- The Huffington Post
If you count these hopelessly unemployed, the real jobless rate is probably close to 22 percent -- John Crudele, New York Post
Amidst the noise war in the corporate media, there's still worthy analysis and reporting going on. Pulitzer-prize winner David Cay Johnston pulled apart the [correction] Social Security Administration's numbers and found some nasty surprises. The idle unemployed grew by 6 million. And many Americans went from wage-earners to wageless completely last year. But our friends the Kochs and banksters?
The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
In The New York Post, John Crudele has a frightening look at the systematic undercounting of the new jobless and increasingly indigent. Fittingly, this is a process that President Obama's top economic advisor Austen Goolsbee has fought since the dark midnight of the Bush years. My understanding of economics (having taken upper-level undergraduate) is inadequate at going further. But this passes the sniff test:
Fact 1: The next employment report will be worse.
When the Labor Department puts out the January employment figures on Feb. 4, they will include an assumption that a lot of companies went out of business.
This is something called the birth/death model that is used by the department. Last year it caused 356,000 jobs to be subtracted from the January job count.
So, the next employment figure should be shockingly bad.
Fact 2: The birth/death model will then turn optimistic in the spring, causing jobs that really don't exist to be added to the Labor Department's count.
It won't make the people who are unemployed feel any better. But it could give Wall Street another excuse to rally and, really, isn't that what it is all about?
Fact 3: Nobody in the media will pick up on this, but the Labor De partment will also do something called a benchmark revision on Feb. 4 that will subtract around 840,000 jobs that the government thought existed, but really don't.
This will mostly make up for the mistakes created by the birth/death model.
Fact 4: That 840,000 job adjustment will only correct errors up to March 2009. Mistakes for the April 2009 to March 2110 period will be corrected next year.
Fact 5: You keep reading that the unemployment rate stayed at 10 percent. But the press has been playing up the 17.3 percent rate that includes those "underemployed," meaning they can't find a full-time job but want one.
Washington:
- Stop toying with monetary policy. We need fiscal spending--a point argued also by George Soros in the latest New York Review of Books. Direct hiring. Instead we're getting layoffs albeit layoffs somewhat tempered by a short-term infusion of cash. The long-run doesn't look so pretty.
We know Austen Goolsbee is right on economics. Now empower him to affect something!
- Income inequality. Want to balance your budgets, shrink your deficits? Place a tax on income over $500 million--those earning it number perhaps less than 100--at 95%. Tax income over $100 million at 60%.
QUIBBLE all you want. The issue here is that we only have a highest tax bracket at $250,000. Deal with that honestly and tell me my ideas are not reasonable and voiced with an urgency fitting the collapse of economic order.