Value-Added Analysis Of The Obama Record On Jobs

Nearly two years into the Obama administration, here is where the country's employment situation stands:

TODAY, the Bureau of Labour Statistics released the last set of American employment numbers to come ahead of the November Congressional elections. If the Democrats were looking for a boost from the numbers, they're sure to be disappointed—and then some. For the fourth month in a row, nonfarm payroll employment declined in September, by a total of 95,000 jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.6%.

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There is little to be positive about elsewhere in the report. The number of people working part-time for economic reasons jumped in September, and nearly 10 million Americans now fall into that category. Partially as a result, the statistic known as U-6, considered a more complete indicator of un- and under-employment, rose from 16.7% in August to 17.1% in September. The previously reported jobless figures for July and August were both revised down slightly. Aside from government employment, payrolls in good producing sectors had a rough month, and construction in particular was hard hit, shedding 21,000 jobs. Private services did better across the board, especially the leisure and hospitality sector, which added 38,000 employees. There is indeed a lot more leisure to go around in America these days.

The Obama administration predicted unemployment would top out at 9% without the stimulus.

The administration predicted unemployment would top out at 7.9% if the stimulus was passed.

As you can see from the report above, the unemployment rate has held steady at 9.6%.

The underemployment rate, a much more accurate picture of the labor market, increased to 17.1%.

To put it simply, the Obama administration has NOT added value to the employment market.

Dems in the Congress and the Senate will pay a price for that miserable record next month.

Obama will have to wait for his accountability moment for a few years.

But it's coming:

A new CNN/Opinion Research survey shows that Americans are now divided on their preference for Barack Obama or George W. Bush, with 47% saying Obama has done a better job as president than Bush and 45% saying Bush did a better job.

It's a marked change from the same time last year. When asked the same question late last year, 57% of Americans picked Obama, and 34% picked Bush.

Oh, yeah - that accountability moment is coming.

Somehow, Obama has managed to erase from the memories of Americans just how bad Bush was.

Heckuva job, Barack!!!!

Heckuva job.

States Not Using Fed Money To Rehire Teachers

Gee, what a surprise - many states are not using the stimulus money to rehire teachers:

As schools handed out pink slips to teachers this spring, states made a beeline to Washington to plead for money for their ravaged education budgets. But now that the federal government has come through with $10 billion, some of the nation’s biggest school districts are balking at using their share of the money to hire teachers right away.

With the economic outlook weakening, they argue that big deficits are looming for the next academic year and that they need to preserve the funds to prevent future layoffs. Los Angeles, for example, is projecting a $280 million budget shortfall next year that could threaten more jobs.

“You’ve got this herculean task to deal with next year’s deficit,” said Lydia L. Ramos, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest after New York City.

“So if there’s a way that you can lessen the blow for next year,” she said, “we feel like it would be responsible to try to do that.”

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In New Jersey, where about 3,000 teachers were let go in May, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration worries that the federal aid will only forestall difficult decisions later, and it is unclear how much will be spent immediately.

“It’s a real double-edged sword,” said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the governor. “This money will not be there next year, and we’re not going to get back up to the funding that they had previously been used to.”

Uh, huh.

But the money - which was raised by cutting $12 billion dollars from food stamps - was meant to rehire teachers THIS YEAR.

At least, that's what Hopey/Changey said:

“We can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children or keep our communities safe,” President Obama said last week. “That doesn’t make sense.”

But the way the law was written allows districts to use the money up until September 2012, so it sounds like educators and school staff already laid off are shit out of luck this year.

I wonder if you dig into the legislation if it turns out that districts don't even have to use the money for teachers.

Given the data fetish Obama and company have, I wouldn't be surprised to find out districts can use the dough to create data tracking systems and standardized tests.

Regardless, it doesn't look like much of the money will be used to rehire laid off teachers now.

Who knows what the money will ultimately get used for?

What is certain is that kids and parents will have their food stamps cut by $59 a month starting in 2013.

That sure is change we can believe in!

Mommy, all my teachers were laid off and I'm hungry...

Another Obama Failure

Other than the Race to the Top boondoggle, which has been highly successful at getting states to close schools, fire principals, fire teachers, tie teacher pay and evaluations to test scores and open lots of for-profit charter schools, the Obama stimulus package has been a failure:

A year and a half after Congress passed the economic-stimulus plan, "some of the big infrastructure projects touted by the Obama administration are still months from visible development," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"The administration said stimulus spending was always intended to roll out in stages, over a period of two years, and that the pace of outlays for infrastructure would be slower than for other parts of the package. But recent opinion polls suggested the White House has struggled to communicate that message, particularly after its emphasis on "shovel-ready" projects during the debate over the plan's passage in early 2009."

A year and a half and the projects STILL haven't been started.

The only thing shovel-ready about the stimulus package was the amount of horseshit Obama and company used to sell it.

As far as I can tell, a major rationale for the stimulus was to give Secretary Arne $4.3 billion in walking around money to close schools, fire teachers and administrators, etc., etc.

Putting people to work, building or rebuilding infrastructure, fixing things - Obama doesn't seem to be too interested in that stuff.

Oh, but education deform really gets him hard.

So hard that the only thing he has fought for harder than Race to the Top is Michael Bennet's corporate ass in Colorado.

But the accountability moment is coming for this administration.

Oh, yes - it is.

If Obama Were A NYC School, He'd Be On The Closure List

President Accountability appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to award himself a B+ for his first year in office.

Sorry, but I beg to differ.

First, let's note that Accountability's signature domestic policy, health care reform, is heading for ignominious defeat. Most people hate the reform proposals (tonight's NBC News/WSJ poll has 32% favoring Obama's reform measures and 47% opposing them) and liberals and progressives in particular think the wishy-washy president caved to moderates and conservatives to create a health care reform proposal that is simply awful. It forces those without health insurance to buy insurance, but doesn't provide any mechanism like a public option or Medicare buy-in to help keep costs down for them. So essentially health care reform garners 33 billion more customers for the health insurance industry, but does little to hold down costs. Maybe the worst thing that could happen for Dems is if this thing does pass. The only thing worse than doing nothing is passing a bad bill that people hate.

Next, let's look at the economy Obama thinks he's turned around. Unemployment remains at 10%, long term unemployment is even worse, the national debt has skyrocketed, and Obama's stimulus package has done too little to add the necessary number of jobs per month to turn things around. Foreclosures continue to rise and are not expected to peak until 2011 and again, Obama's foreclosure plan has been a dismal failure. On the financial front, it's true the punch bowl is back for the boys on Wall Street and the financial markets are doing quite well. But Wall Street is taking Main Street to the cleaners and Obama is helping them to do it. Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture describes the latest Wall Street/Obama administration outrage:

The ongoing transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1% continues unabated.

The Treasury Department, via the IRS, has made a terrible deal with Citigroup for TARP repayment: They repay $20 billion in TARP money, and in exchange we give them $38 billion in tax abatements.

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The looting of the Treasury, begun in panic under George W. Bush, continues in ignorance under Barack W. Obama.

As Matt Tiabbi wrote in the latest Rolling Stone, Obama has done everything in his power to make sure the boys on Wall Street have been able to enrich themselves at the public trough while failing to get any meaningful reform passed. He didn't campaign on these Wall Street-friendly policies, but he certainly has governed this way:

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Now maybe Obama thinks he deserves a B+ for 10% unemployment, a record debt, trillion dollar bailouts to Wall Street without any meaningful reform in exchange, and a health care reform measure that only a health care industry executive could love, but I have to tell you, if he were a school under Arne Duncan's command, he'd be slated for "turnaround" via closure, not the merit pay President Accountability seems to think he deserves.