The Patriot Post Brief 12-10-2012

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The Patriot Post Brief 12-10-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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What if the Numbers Were Accurate?

December 10, 2012

The Foundation

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

For the Record

"The more you drill down into the November jobs report1, the worse it looks. ... 1. The two-tenths drop in the unemployment rate was because people gave up looking for work. The labor force participation rate fell to 63.6% from 63.8% in October. If it had just held steady since then, the unemployment rate would be back over 8%. Indeed, if the LFP rate was just where it was in November 2011, the unemployment rate would be 8.3%. Some 542,000 Americans left the labor force just last month. 2. If labor force participation was at its January 2009 level, the unemployment rate would be a whopping 10.7%. ... 3. In November, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $23.63. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have risen by 1.7%. Unfortunately, inflation -- as measured by the consumer price index -- has risen by 2.2% over the past year, meaning average hourly earnings have fallen by 0.5% in real terms. 4. The number of long-term unemployed remains at sky-high 40.1%, the same as in August. 5. Since the beginning of this year, employment growth has averaged 151,000 per month, about the same as the average monthly job gain of 153,000 in 2011. At that pace, the U.S. would not return to pre-Great Recession employment levels until after 2025.... Bottom line: The November jobs report showed job creation far too slow to get the labor market back to pre-recession levels or boost wages. Faster, please." --American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis2

Government

"Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments. By November, according to data BLS released today, the total number of people employed had climbed to 143,262,000, an overall increase of 847,000 in the six months since June. In the same five-month period since June, the number of people employed by government increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall." --CNSNews editor-in-chief Terence Jeffrey3

Opinion in Brief

"Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, reached another high in September, according to new data released by the United Stated Department of Agriculture. The most recent data on SNAP participation were released Friday, and showed that 47,710,324 people were enrolled in the program in September, an increase of 607,559 from the 47,102,765 enrolled in August. The number of households enrolled in the program also increased from 22,684,463 in August to 22,973,698 in September, an increase of 289,235. The average benefit, according to the new data, was $134.29 per person and $278.89 per household. ... The new numbers mean that an estimated one in 6.5 people in America were on food stamps in September. In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Since 2001, spending on the program has quadrupled and doubled in the last four years." --The Daily Caller's Caroline May4

Insight

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious." --Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

Re: The Left

"Barack Obama and the Democrats are coming for you, middle class. Make no mistake about it. They're telling you a lot of convenient fairy tales now, for political gain. Maybe Obama will even try to stage a heroic 'rescue' via 'middle class tax cut' after we go over the 'fiscal cliff,' at which point Howard Dean will be a good little soldier and put his liberal honesty in neutral for a while, at least until after the 2014 elections. ... When the Democrats come for you, coddled taxpayers of the 'middle class,' it will be with tears in their eyes. Sorrowfully they will inform you that the titanic pressure from years of their irresponsible deficit spending leaves them with no choice to but to 'ask' you to 'pay a little more.' They'll try re-defining the middle class first, the same way they made a concerted effort to re-define 'millionaires' as people making $250,000 per year. ... And did you notice how smoothly the hated top One Percent became the Two Percent, in just a matter of weeks? Soon the lower boundary of sinister, unfair wealth will drop, and people who make $100k to $200k will suddenly find themselves classified as 'millionaires.' Then the Left will start pointing out that people who make $80k to $100k really don't have much in common with the Sainted Middle Class, and they will also be excommunicated." --columnist John Hayward7

Essential Liberty

"Debasing the value of money by creating more of it is nothing new or esoteric. Irresponsible governments have done this, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years. It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all. All the pretty talk about how tax rates will be raised only on 'the rich' hides the ugly fact that the poorest people in the country will see the value of their money decline, just like everybody else, and at the same rate as everybody else, when the government creates more money and spends it. If you have $100 and, after inflation follows from 'quantitative easing,' that $100 dollars will only buy what $80 bought before, then that is the same economically as if the government had taxed away one-fifth of your money and spent it. But it is not the same politically, so long as gullible people don't look beyond words to the reality that inflation taxes everybody, the poorest as well as the richest." --economist Thomas Sowell8