Does 20% unemployment register at all in Washington?
Does the fact that health insurance premiums are up
20% register with Washington? Apparently not.

All that matters is that the stock market is up 20%.
Politicians funders are still feeling no pain.

Last night I decided to start carrying around a sign
that says, "Vote for Neither."

To answer JohnH...no it doesn't register in Washington...or at the state level.

I got into a conversation/argument several weeks ago with someone about Obama's "job creation" so looked up the jobs in my state at the ESC.
They are shown under "Recovery Jobs"....there were less than 200 state wide and all of them were either temp/11 months, no benefits, part time state employment jobs like teachers aides, drug counselors and etc....really pitiful. Then I looked up nation wide under Federal jobs...they were all under the Forestry Service. I can't see any "jobs" in the private sector that have come from the recovery act at all...they are all in the state and federal job system.
Construction,highway, commercial and etc are at stand still state wide. In my town a bridge repair was underway and has now been been shut down indefinitely so we can't use the bridge at all.
But then the state took 1.8 billion from the state highway fund to pay the 1.8 billion shortfall in the state employees health care fund.
State employees don't pay anything for their health insurance if they work for the state for 5 years/now 10 years..so NC taxpayers foot the medical bills for all the state retirees. Our new governor has informed us we will have tax increase to cover this problem.

This country is so f'ed up it is hard to even comment on.

One thing that shows how bad it is, in this area at least, is all the Mexican labor workers have disappeared..gone..pouff.
There use to be several thousand that worked in the timber sector for GP and WYH and in construction and even those jobs have evaporated.

Actually, just because their are insufficient policies to counter the jobless recovery is not proof that it is not registering on DC. It is relative entitlements, not absolute entitlements, that matter.

Lower compensation for workers, as well as higher direct compensation for the elites, is in their self interest. One of the first acts of Ronald Reagan was to bust unions.

Let's not forget that Obama was a cosponsor of financial sector legislation to prohibit regulating their compensation.

The evidence seems so overwhelming as to what would be required to more fairly share U.S. productivity increases over the last three decades, that I wonder what Leo thinks about what policies John Edwards might have pursued, had he, rather than Obama, been nominated.

What is the advise he is giving Obama on the "jobless recovery"? Is it different from that given to Edwards? What is his position on what "growth" is, and the whether it is private or public goods that are lacking

Does he support California's and other states' request for federal aid?

The view of the world from Washington--

Job programs: $300 Billion (2)
Ten years of health care: $Trillion (1)
Financial bailouts and pointless wars: priceless

Financial bailouts >$10 Trillion(2),
"Defense" Department over 10 years >$6 Trillion
(2)

(1)funded by revenue increases & cost savings
(2) funded by increased government borrowing from
China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Russia and the Social
Security Trust Fund

No, Washington truly doesn't get it.

FDR's Washington got it.

Obama's Washington doesn't get it.

If the State of the Union speech does not launch effective jobs programs, then I will probably have to concede that Obama doesn't get it. I definitely agree that FDR did.

FDR didn't get it either. FDR became President in 1933 with unemployment at almost 25%; by 1939 the unemployment rate was still 17%.

Obama has to stop terrifying the private sector if he wants it to hire again. Right now, there's not a business in America that knows what its tax burden or health care costs will be a year from now, except they can guess the direction -- up, way up. That severely retards hiring.

But Obama can't think like that. That's why he is offering his panacea of "green jobs" again -- another government boondoggle that spends $135,000 per job.

Nadine, the only place the American businesses are
hiring is in China. In case you haven't been paying
attention, there was a great sucking sound of
American jobs leaving for China during the last
decade, which has mostly to do with their preference
for sweat shop labor. And it has nothing to do with
taxes. American businesses pay some of the lowest
taxes in the developed world, yet they whine
constantly about tax burden. And you can carp all
you want about the costs of health care, but you
have no absolutely no solution except to let people
die.

"And you can carp all you want about the costs of health care, but you have no absolutely no solution except to let people die"

Well, at least thats better than her solution for the Palestinians. She doesn't just advocate LETTING them die, she goes all atwitter at the thought of actually KILLING them.

Leo Hindery is right to try to identify the real level of
unemployment but the same categories in earlier recessions
should be compared if possible.

On FDR, I thought the New Deal reduced unemployment from 25
to 10 percent by 1936 and a premature attempt to balance the
budget brought it up (I think) to 12 percent in 1938. In 1939 it
began to come down as a result of preparations for war. The
1938-39 figure might have been higher but if so I would be
interested to know the primary source that confirms it.

New Deal spending on infrastructure had a valid purpose
apart from any employment effects. Critics at the time opposed
the Tennessee Valley Authority as a retailer of electric power on
the grounds that the TVA would compete with private utilities.
But these utilities at the time saw no future in making larger
private investments to serve people outside the major cities and
towns. The larger market made possible as a result of long-
distance transmission proved this view to be too narrow, and the
new hydro-electricity was critical to the war effort. The question
about infrastructure spending today is whether it will be
effective and useful.

Unemployment, both in the U.S. and the world as a whole, marches ever higher because the field of economics doesn't account for the relationship between population density and per capita consumption.

Following the beating the field of economics took over the seeming failure of Malthus' theory, economists adamantly refuse to ever again consider the effects of population growth. If they did, they might come to understand that once an optimum population density is breached, further over-crowding begins to erode per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment.

And these effects of an excessive population density are actually imported when a nation like the U.S. attempts to trade freely with other nations much more densely populated - nations like China, Japan, Germany, Korea and a host of others. The result is an automatic trade deficit and loss of jobs - tantamount to economic suicide.

Using 2006 data, an in-depth analysis reveals that, of our top twenty per capita trade deficits in manufactured goods (the trade deficit divided by the population of the country in question), eighteen are with nations much more densely populated than our own. Even more revealing, if the nations of the world are divided equally around the median population density, the U.S. had a trade surplus in manufactured goods of $17 billion with the half of nations below the median population density. With the half above the median, we had a $480 billion deficit!

If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit my web site at http://PeteMurphy.wordpress.com.

Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"