America's Job Market

FL Considers Forcing Jobless to Work for Unemployment Checks

by Stephen Clark

With more than 1.1 million people out of work in Florida, one state lawmaker wants to make them volunteer in order to collect unemployment benefits.

Republican State Rep. Kathleen Passidomo has introduced a bill that would require the jobless to volunteer at a nonprofit for at least four hours each week.

"This may be a way to energize people to find a job," Passidomo told FoxNews.com. She said the idea came from her 87-year-old father, a retired physician who volunteers at a senior health clinic. He noticed that when there's an opening at the clinic, volunteers are the first to be hired, she said.

"So my thought was this is an opportunity – a win-win for everyone," she said. It gets the unemployed "out of the house, gets them involved in a community project. So this would be a way for the unemployed people to give back. And what that could do is create a relationship. A lot of executive directors at nonprofits are knowledgeable about what's going on."

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Obamacare will cost 800,000 jobs

46 Out of 50 States Nearing Bankruptcy

John Mulkey

While the precarious financial situation of California gets the majority of the press coverage, it is only one of many potential defaults making investors nervous. An article in the Financial Times reports growing signs that many regional deficits are beginning to resemble those of the eurozone countries.

Forty-six states have just begun fiscal year 2011 and for most the news isn’t just bad, it’s catastrophic. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, those states are “facing a Greek-like crisis.” And for all excluding Vermont, local statutes require a balanced budget. It’s not that the leaders haven’t made an effort to trim expenses; more than 230,000 state and local government jobs have been eliminated in the past two years, with thousands more occurring each month. Mark Zandi at Moody’s has estimated that states could come up short by almost $200 billion next year, resulting in the loss of almost a million more jobs. Others say the losses could be double that number.

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Bernanke: 4 or 5 years until unemployment returns to normal

Why the Spending Stimulus Failed

by Michael J. Boskin

President Obama and congressional leaders meeting yesterday confronted calls for four key fiscal decisions: short-run fiscal stimulus, medium-term fiscal consolidation, and long-run tax and entitlement reform. Mr. Obama wants more spending, especially on infrastructure, and higher tax rates on income, capital gains and dividends (by allowing the lower Bush rates to expire). The intellectual and political left argues that the failed $814 billion stimulus in 2009 wasn't big enough, and that spending control any time soon will derail the economy.

But economic theory, history and statistical studies reveal that more taxes and spending are more likely to harm than help the economy. Those who demand spending control and oppose tax hikes hold the intellectual high ground.

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Stimulus: Still Not Working!

Unbelievably, the administration and its allies

keep insisting that a failed policy was a success.

by Veronique de Rugy

Imagine that I break my arm, but instead of getting a cast I take a big shot of morphine. The drug will make me feel better, but it won’t fix my arm. When the effect wears off, the pain will come back. And instead of being restored to their proper position, my bones will remain out of place, perhaps solidifying there, which will surely mean chronic pain in the long run.

Stimulus spending is like morphine. It might feel good in the short term for the beneficiaries of the money, but it doesn’t help repair the economy. And it causes more damage if it gets in the way of a proper recovery.

The stimulus isn’t working because it is based on faulty economics. Using historical spending data, the Harvard economist Robert Barro and recent Harvard graduate Charles Redlick have shown that in the best case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth—between 40 and 70 cents. They also found that if the government spends $1 and raises taxes to pay for it, the economy will shrink by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases hurts the economy. Even if the tax is applied in the future, taxpayers today adjust their consumption and business owners refrain from hiring based on the expectation of future tax increases, which worsen the economy today.

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States Raise Payroll Taxes to Repay Loans

by Sara Murray

State governments are borrowing heavily from the federal government to keep paying unemployment-insurance benefits and, even with the weak job market, most states are raising payroll taxes to pay off the loans.

Thirty one states, their unemployment-insurance funds empty, have borrowed nearly $41 billion from the federal government. California alone has borrowed nearly $8.8 billion as of mid-November, according to the Labor Department.

As states try to replenish the funds and begin to repay the loans, employers are facing increases in both state and federal payroll taxes, a potential barrier to new hiring.

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Obama Calls India Creator, Not Poacher, of US Jobs

by Scott Baker

MUMBAI, India (AP) — Searching for help half a world away, President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States.

Fresh off a political trouncing at home, Obama was determined to show tangible, economic results on his long Asia trip, and that was apparent from almost the moment he set foot on a steamy afternoon in the world’s largest democracy. By the end of the first of his three days in India, he was promoting $10 billion in trade deals — completed in time for his visit — that the White House says will create about 54,000 jobs at home.

That’s a modest gain compared with the extent of the enduring jobless crisis in the United States. Economists say it would require on the level of 300,000 new jobs a month to put a real dent in an unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent.

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Begging In The Streets - Obama's New America

by TheRightScoop

How perfect a metaphor can there be of Obama’s presidency. The economy has slowed to a crawl as he’s increased our debt load while not doing anything to fix our unemployment problem. People are out of work at alarming levels and there seems to be no hope in sight. And here you have what appears to be a homeless man begging as Obama is pulling away in his SUV. Seems to me this is exactly what he wants – us to come begging to the government for our sustenance.

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