3800 block of North Fairhill Street. Notice how many homes have put themselves in jail, put bars on their front porches to try to protect themselves from criminals. Photo via Google Maps, June 2019. pic.twitter.com/OaYIEjSoPD
— Dana Pico (@Dana_TFSJ) August 2, 2022
3900 block of North Fairhill Street. Click to enlarge.
What better example could there be for the need for ‘broken windows’ policing?
According to the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 317 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 31st. With a recorded 257 murders as of the end of June, that means that 60 dead bodies littered Philly’s mean streets just in July, topping the 48 killed in June and 54 murdered in May, making July the city’s deadliest month so far.
But there’s more. We had previously noted that, in 2021, there had been a decrease in the homicide rate in Philly, beginning July 9th. July 2021 saw 48 murders in the city.
As of June 30th, there had been 257 homicides in the city, 5.17% fewer than the 271 on the same day in 2021. At the end of July, those 317 homicides are only 0.63% fewer than the 319 last year. At least so far, last year’s ‘lull’ has not shown up. Rather, it seems as though the gang-bangers and wannabes are trying to make up for lost time.
As of the end of July in 2021, there had been 1,356 recorded shootings in Philly; compared to 1388 this year.
Philadelphia is not a monolith. Heavily segregated, much of the violence has been restricted to five dozen blocks. As Robert Stacy McCain has noted, not all neighborhoods are created equal, and if you’re white and live in Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill, you don’t have nearly as much about which to worry.
But, hey, the real problem is Monkeypox!
Remember “Cash for clunkers”? From Investopedia:
Cash for Clunkers
By Julia Kagan | Reviewed by Lea D Uradu | Fact checked by Kirsten Rohrs Schmitt | September 30, 2021
Cash for Clunkers was a U.S. government program that provided financial incentives to car owners to trade in their old, less fuel-efficient vehicles and buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. The purpose of the program was primarily to act as an economic stimulus during the Great Recession by providing the population with monetary incentives to buy new cars, thereby increasing automobile sales, while at the same time reducing carbon emissions by replacing old vehicles with new, fuel-efficient ones.
The program, passed by a Congress controlled by Democrats and signed into law by President Barack Hussein Obama, the plan ran from June 2009 through August 24, 2009, when it ran out of money.
At the time, I called it welfare for the well-to-do, and I was right. Running during the so-called “great recession”, the only people who could afford to buy a new car were the ones whose jobs had survived the cuts, knew that their jobs were secure, and had good enough credit to qualify for a new car loan. In other words, they were the people during the “great recession” who didn’t need help from the government. Only 49% of the new vehicles sold through the cash for clunkers program were manufactured in the United States.
Now we have the ‘deal’ between Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on electric vehicles. From Reuters:
U.S. Senate Democratic deal would expand EV tax credits
By David Shepardson | July 27, 2022 | 11:00 PM EDT
WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) – A Senate Democratic deal includes a new $4,000 tax credit for used electric vehicles and other new tax credits and grants for automakers to retool factories to build greener cars.
The deal struck between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin also includes an expansion of the existing $7,500 EV tax credit as well as a new $10 billion investment tax credit to build clean-technology manufacturing facilities, according to a summary from Schumer’s office.
The bill that Schumer and Manchin agreed to also includes $2 billion in cash grants to retool existing auto manufacturing facilities “to manufacture clean vehicles, ensuring that auto manufacturing jobs stay in the communities that depend on them.”
If it becomes law, it will further provide up to $20 billion in loans to build new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities and $30 billion for additional production tax credits “to accelerate U.S. manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals processing.”
Schumer said the Senate was expected to vote on the proposed legislation next week and it would next go to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.
President Joe Biden last year proposed boosting EV tax credits to up to $12,500 per vehicle — including $4,500 for union-made vehicles — and lifting a cap of 200,000 vehicles per manufacturer on the $7,500 credit. Automakers including General Motors (GM.N) and Tesla (TSLA.O) have hit the cap and are no longer eligible for the existing EV tax credit.
Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said this month it had hit the sales cap, which means its $7,500 credit will phase out over the next year.
Automakers have heavily lobbied for an extension of the EV tax credit, warning they cannot meet aggressive goals to cut emissions without tax incentives that make electric vehicles more cost competitive.
Also see: William Teach: NY Times: Democrats “Inflation” Plan May Lower Costs Sometime In The Future
The new EV tax credits would be limited to trucks, vans and SUVs with a suggested retail price of no more than $80,000 and to cars priced at no more than $55,000. They would be limited to families with adjusted gross incomes of up to $300,000 annually.
This is kind of laughable. How many people, and, for Mr Manchin, how many West Virginians, can afford to buy an $80,000 truck or a $55,000 new car? Once again, this is welfare for the well-to-do!
Limited to families with an AGI of less than $300,000? Median household income was $67,521 in 2020, down 2.9% from the 2019 median of $69,560, thanks to the idiotic COVID restrictions. Guesstimates of current median family income vary, but this estimate of $76,563 seems at least somewhat realistic.
Of course, the median household income for Senator Manchin’s constituents is just $51,615. They could really use that $7,500 tax credit, but how many outside of Charleston or Morgantown will be able to afford to buy a Tesla? In reality, Mr Manchin’s constituents will be taxed to subsidize new car purchases for federal employees in Maryland and executives in New York and Connecticut. 🙂
I found nothing stating that the bill would require, as the old cash for clunkers bill did, that the cars the well-to-do traded in for a new electric vehicle be destroyed, so while the bill, theoretically reducing carbon emissions from new cars, wouldn’t take their older, gasoline-engines off the road, but hey, if the goal is to reduce emissions, then it should. Take the newer used cars — we assume here that the people who can afford to buy a new vehicle have the newest existing cars — off the road, and that not only reduces the total emissions, but makes the used car market relatively older, meaning that those gasoline-powered vehicles will wear out sooner. In 2021, there were 43.1 million used cars purchased, versus only 15.3 million new vehicles, meaning that roughly 73.8% of all car sales were of used, not new vehicles. And the poorer the state, the higher percentage of used cars bought, simply because fewer residents can afford new.[1]Full disclosure: when we bought Mrs Pico’s 2021 Toyota Camry in June, it had been a dealer demonstrator with just 6,000 miles on it. This was the second car we bought with just dealer demo … Continue reading
As always, this act will not do what it is purported to do. It was put together by Democrats, who have virtually no understanding of economics; if they actually did understand economics, they wouldn’t be Democrats! The only question is: just how badly will it fail?
References
| ↑1 | Full disclosure: when we bought Mrs Pico’s 2021 Toyota Camry in June, it had been a dealer demonstrator with just 6,000 miles on it. This was the second car we bought with just dealer demo miles. If we had bought new, well, we probably wouldn’t even have the car yet, due to supply issues. |
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It seems that some people have suggested that the name “Monkeypox” somehow discriminates against blacks and homosexual males, and should be changed, which immediately became the subject of jokes:
Monkeypox is henceforth known as Schlong Covid. #SchlongCovid #monkeypox
hahahaha pic.twitter.com/4WfuA1sEKC
— Induna Fleming ⚔️ (@SirGrantFleming) July 29, 2022
The apparently odd notion that, with Monkeypox, an infection that is being spread primarily, though not exclusively, by male homosexual sex, should make them question whether they really need to copulate with that cute guy at the end of the bar just never seems to occur. Continue reading
To absolutely no one’s surprise, second quarter Gross Domestic Product figures came in showing real economic contraction. From The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. GDP Fell at 0.9% Annual Rate in Second Quarter
The economy contracted after shrinking earlier in the year, held back by rising inflation and interest rates—marking a recession in many eyes
by Harriet Torry | Thursday, July 28, 2022 | 8:47 AM EDT
The U.S. economy shrank for a second quarter in a row—a common definition of recession—as businesses trimmed their inventories, the housing market buckled under rising interest rates, and high inflation took steam out of consumer spending.
Gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, fell at an inflation and seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.9% in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marked a deterioration from the 1.6% rate of contraction recorded in the first three months of 2022.
The report indicated the economy met a commonly used definition of recession—two straight quarters of declining economic output.
The official arbiter of recessions in the U.S. is the National Bureau of Economic Research, which defines one as a significant decline in economic activity, spread across the economy for more than a few months. Its Business Cycle Dating Committee considers factors including employment, output, retail sales, and household income — and it usually doesn’t make a recession determination until long after the fact.
The GDP report offered some discouraging signs, and underscored the challenges facing U.S. businesses, consumers and policy makers—including high inflation, weakening consumer sentiment and supply-chain volatility.
Emphasis mine.
So, the Biden Administration, eager as it is to use a subjective rather than objective measure of inflation, gets some political cover from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private organization headquartered in — drum roll, please! — Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In September 2010, after a conference call with its Business Cycle Dating Committee, the NBER declared that the Great Recession in the United States had officially ended in 2009 and lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. In response, a number of newspapers wrote that the majority of Americans did not believe the recession was over, mainly because they were still struggling and because the country still faced high unemployment. However, the NBER release had noted that “In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity. Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month. A recession is a period of falling economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. The trough marks the end of the declining phase and the start of the rising phase of the business cycle.”
So, the eight economists who decide if the U.S. is in a recession using these markers declared that the 2007-2009 “Great Recession” ended 15 months after they saw the signs that it did. That’s the political cover the Biden Administration believe will take them through November 8th, election day.
But it won’t work. With a 9.1% annualized inflation rate in June, Americans don’t need dry statistics to tell them when we’re in a recession; they can feel it, in their wallets, and in their bones.
The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors raised their base interest rates another 0.75% just yesterday, in an attempt to fight the high inflation rate, and signaled that another rate hike would probably occur.
The very low unemployment rate is what is giving the Democrats hope that this isn’t a ‘real’ recession.
Inflation matters a lot when thinking about GDP—exclude it from the Q2 figures and the economy grew at a 7.8% annual rate.
The fact that nominal growth was wiped out entirely by inflation helps to explain why voters are so angry and unhappy.
— Josh Boak (@joshboak) July 28, 2022
GDP is measured in dollars, and spending increased across the board, as it does almost every quarter. That’s why inflation is calculated in, to keep spending numbers from obscuring actual economic growth. Yes, inflation completely wiped out the growth in spending, but there’s more to it than just that: while inflation was 9.1% in June, wage growth was much smaller, 5.1%. Consumers spent more, but their wages did not keep up with what they had to spend; the average American is poorer, in real terms, than he was a year ago.
Bidenomics has been a disaster for Americans, but, not to worry, at least he’s not sending out any mean tweets!
I hadn’t expected this, though I suppose that I should have.
We have previously noted the murder of 73-year-old James “Simmie” Lambert by a group of Philadelphia teens and even younger brats. What I didn’t mention on this site was that the 13-year-old girl who was questioned but not arrested was herself shot in a not very nice neighborhood, the 5800 block of Osceola Street.
Well, it seems like the ‘hood doesn’t like that some of the kids who beat Mr Lambert to death have been criminally charged:
Family of 73-year-old man fatally beaten with traffic cone says they’re being harassed, judge issues stay away order
On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr.
by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, July 27, 2022
The family of the 73-year-old man who was fatally beaten by teens with a traffic cone last month said they have been harassed and taunted by kids showing up outside their house in recent weeks.
On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr., who died last month after two teens hit him multiple times with a traffic cone.
Tania Stephens, Lambert’s niece, said the kids stood outside her mother’s Strawberry Mansion house, pointing and laughing, making the family feel intimidated and harassed.
In response, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Joffie C. Pittman III on Tuesday approved a stay-away order requested by the District Attorney’s Office, ordering all defendants, their families, and any third parties related to them to stand down or face arrest.
Yeah, that’s going to make a difference!
According to Lonny Fish, the lawyer representing Gamara Mosley, one of the two 14-year-olds charged with third-degree murder in the case, some of the girls photographed outside the home are believed to be sisters of a 13-year-old girl who was present during the incident, but was not charged with any crimes. It is their understanding, Fish said, that the kids had been on their way to the pool nearby and stopped by the house spontaneously.
Would that be the same 13-year-old girl who was shot on Osceola Street? Osceola Street is about four miles from the Strawberry Mansion section of Philly, and a bit more than five miles from Cecil B Moore and 21st Street, where Mr Lambert was murdered.
Makes me wonder: were any of these girls on the way to the pool the same girls whose violence and vandalism caused the city to close the pool at McVeigh Recreation Center for the summer? Granted, it’s about 3 miles from McVeigh to Strawberry Mansion, but certainly not a distance that healthy teenaged girls couldn’t walk.
The girls were friends of Mosley’s up until her arrest, he said, but Mosley’s family has nothing to do with the visits to Lambert’s relatives’ home, which he called “indefensible” and wrong.
“My client is 14, and she’s incarcerated right now,” Fish said. “Whatever it is, it’s not at the behest of any of the people supervising my client.”
It may well be that young Miss Mosley and her family had nothing to do with the harassment of the Lambert family, because they’d certainly be stupid to do anything like this and jeopardize the inevitable request by her mouthpiece to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system. Then again, there’s not a lot of evidence that there’s much intelligence in a family that let Miss Mosley out playing in the streets at 2:30 in the morning.
Some of my Philly friends are just shaking their heads at the violence happening in the City of Brotherly Love, but the story from The Philadelphia Inquirer really tells you all that you need to know: too many people are on the side of the criminals and juvenile delinquents! That’s how District Attorney Larry Krasner, who’d rather keep the bad guys on the streets than behind bars, got elected and then re-elected, and that’s how he’ll get re-elected again in 2025 if he chooses to run again.
Philly has more than just bad adults; the city has horrible mothers and fathers — if the fathers are even around — rearing children who are delinquents because they want to be delinquents, because they think it’s just so cool to be gangsters and wannabes. No government programs will ever help when the kids are subjected to rotten parents from the beginning.
I have told everybody what is needed to solve the city’s problems, but it’s just way, way, way too politically incorrect for anyone to consider.
Other than the Library of Congress, which is supposed to receive two copies of every copyrighted work, every library in the country exercises some discretion as to what books, magazines and other material to purchase and add to its collection. Discretion is what the Central Bucks School Board has mandated:
Central Bucks approves contentious library policy targeting ‘sexualized content’ in books amid community opposition
The policy, said the superintendent, would create a process for the selection of new books and for parents to challenge “gratuitous, salacious, over-the-top, unnecessary, sexualized content.”
by Oona Goodin-Smith | Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Facing heated community opposition, the Central Bucks School District on Tuesday approved a contentious library policy that takes aim at challenging books with “sexualized content” — guidelines the district’s superintendent says ensure students are reading “age-appropriate material,” but that the Pennsylvania Library Association calls one of the most restrictive in schools across the state.By US Census, Ruhrfisch – taken from US Census website [1] and modified by User:Ruhrfisch, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=808255
In a 6-3 vote, after a rally and more than an hour of public comment — most of which was vehemently opposing the policy — and questions by some board members about its origins, the Republican-dominated board voted to advance the policy that’s raised alarm among civil rights groups. . . . .
Wielding signs reading “dictators ban books, not democracies,” and “love not hate makes CB great,” dozens of parents, students, community members, educators, and advocates rallied outside the Doylestown school district headquarters Tuesday night ahead of the vote, calling for the board to strike the policy. Many repeated their remarks during public comment before the school board. Only a couple speakers voiced their approval for the policy.
“This is not a ban, this is not censorship, it’s common sense,” said one mother, who said she was “against minors being exposed to sexually explicit content.”
Full disclosure: before I retired, I did some work in Bucks County, and specifically in the Doylestown area, where the Central Bucks School District is located, though none for the schools specifically.
A very obvious point: attendance at school is compulsory for children in the United States, and the public schools have, in effect, a captive audience. Thus, when schools take decisions on what books and other materials are to be housed in their libraries, they are exposing that captive audience to those materials.
Another very obvious point: while the Central Bucks School Board can limit what materials are bought and housed in the schools’ libraries, they have exactly zero authority over library choices in any other place, or over bookstores, or amazon.com, or any other place which buys, sells, lends, or distributes anything. If the students in the district want to read about sex, it’s widely available, in other places, including, sometimes for free, over the internet. Central Bucks is not exactly a poverty-stricken area; it’s difficult to imagine that more than a handful of homes of school-aged children lack internet access.
The public schools do not exist, and should not exist, for sexualizing children. There should be no normalizing of homosexuality or ‘transgenderism,’ or of promiscuity. That’s what concerns normal parents, and that’s what concerned the elected school board. If some parents want their children to learn about abnormal sexuality, hey, that’s on them!
Karen Downer, president of the NAACP’s Bucks County branch, noted that books most frequently flagged for sexual content “tend to include certain themes,” including the history of Black people, LGBTQ topics or characters, and race and racism. The books also are often written by marginalized authors, she said.
Does Miss Debbie Downer mean books which stir up racial strife or that push the normalization of homosexuality? Guess what? Those should not be part of school libraries! If some parents want to stir up racial strife — and, despite bordering Philadelphia at its extreme southeastern end, Bucks County’s population are only 4.7% non-Hispanic black, 6.1% Hispanic, 5.5% Asian, and 82.4% non-Hispanic white — that’s their business, but it should not be what the public schools teach.
“The policy is vague and overbroad,” said Richard T. Ting, an attorney with the ACLU.
“We’re also talking about library books, …not required reading for classwork. This is just books in the library that are there for students, and students should be free to choose what they read. Families should be able to discuss those things with their kids, as well. It shouldn’t be up to a few people … to decide what everyone else gets access to.”
But that’s just it: in any library, “a few people . . . decide what everyone else gets access to,” as far as their collection is concerned. Any materials not present in the school libraries can be found elsewhere, often by an internet search, so that people don’t have to leave home to do so. If families wish to discuss “those things,” with their children, they can find “those things” on amazon.com, and download them onto their computers or Kindles immediately.
Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Not just no, but Hell no!
St Mary Mother of God Church, Washington DC. Photo by Farragut, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
DC parish rues Latin Mass ban, warns of financial and membership losses
By John Lavenburg | Monday, July 25, 2022
NEW YORK – The community at St. Mary Mother of God appealed to Cardinal Wilton Gregory during an archdiocesan synod listening session not to ban the Traditional Latin Mass at the parish, mainly because it would mean potentially losing about half of the parishioners.
That appeal failed. The listening sessions concluded in May, and Gregory announced July 22 that the Traditional Latin Mass would be restricted in the archdiocese to three non-parochial churches. The plan goes into effect on September 21.
For St. Mary’s, the change will be more than simply replacing a Mass in the Old Rite with a Mass in the New Rite. Parish vitality – in both the pews and community – is now a question mark, and closure isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Skipping down, here’s the money line:
The present St. Mary’s church was built in 1890 and has served downtown Washington, D.C. ever since. Currently, it serves three distinct communities. It has about 200 Traditional Latin Mass parishioners, 120 parishioners who attend Mass in the ordinary form in English, and about 100 Chinese parishioners who are ministered to autonomously.
Assuming that those numbers are reasonably accurate, that means that St Mary’s could lose roughly 48%, almost half, of its parishioners, parishioners who contribute roughly 60% of St Mary’s collections.
In the 25-minute homily, De Rosa also called it “unjust” that none of the people involved in this decision ever visited the St. Mary’s Traditional Latin Mass parishioners. De Rosa requested that Gregory visit the parish in the spring, and was told by Father Anthony Lickteig, the episcopal vicar for clergy, that “the Cardinal will not be able to visit St. Mary’s at this time due to his schedule,” according to a copy of the email obtained by Crux.
In other words, His Eminence, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, just plain didn’t care about the 200 parishioners who attend the Tridentine Mass at St Mary’s. You can try to explain it any other way you wish, but that’s what it all comes down to, he just didn’t care.
According to Fr De Rosa’s letter to his parishioners, the Tridentine Mass will now be celebrated at the Franciscan Monastery in Brookland, which is 3.8 miles from St Mary’s, about a 16 minute drive along US Route 1 North, not too far to drive, which means that many of the Old Rite parishioners might not be too put out, and able to make the trip.
It also means that for most of the Tridentine Mass parishioners, it won’t be too difficult to abandon their home parish. And it means that Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Archbishop of Washington, will have a very nice church building and grounds to sell, when parish membership dwindles to 220 people.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release the first guesstimate of real gross domestic product for the second quarter on Thursday, July 28th; the second guesstimate is scheduled for Thursday, August 25th, and the third for Thursday, September 29th. The first guesstimate on third quarter GDP is scheduled for Thursday, October 27th, just 12 days before the mid-term congressional elections.
The second quarter numbers will be bad. How can we tell? The White House, which certainly has the advance numbers, is trying to redefine what indicates a recession, away from the standard and simple two straight quarters of decline in GDP, to “a holistic look at the data.”
A clue: whenever anyone uses the adjective “holistic” to describe something, you know that bovine feces is about to follow.
The initial estimate of first quarter GDP was -1.4%, but by the third report, it was down to -1.6%. With the one negative quarter in the books, if the second quarter also shows economic contraction, everyone would say we’re in a recession . . . and the White House can’t have that!
Well, Thursday isn’t here yet, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had its own early guesstimate:
Latest estimate: -1.6 percent — July 19, 2022
The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -1.6 percent on July 19, down from -1.5 percent on July 15. After this morning’s housing starts report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of second-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from -8.8 percent to -10.1 percent.
The next GDPNow update is Wednesday, July 27. Please see the “Release Dates” tab below for a list of upcoming releases.
It’s only a guesstimate, but, then again, so is the ‘official’ first estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis! While -1.6% could be off slightly, it’s highly unlikely that it would be off enough to signal actual growth rather than economic contraction.
In other words, a recession, the dreaded “r” word the Biden Administration wants desperately to avoid.
So, they’ll redefine away from the “r” word, and hope that the credentialed media will go along with it. The trouble is that the credentialed media are no longer the only media in town, and you can bet your bottom euro that the Republicans will pound, pound, pound on that word.
It won’t even be difficult, because inflation has hit, hard. As we previously noted, inflation has been creeping inexorably up, hitting 9.1% year-over-year in June. Naturally, President Biden wanted to dispute the figures, calling them “out of date,” but nevertheless telling Americans he was going to do something about it.
In one regard, he’s right: fuel prices have declined since their maximum on June 14th, but they are still significantly higher than they were at this time last year, and the inflation figures are based on the same month the previous year. The national average for regular gasoline was $4.467 per gallon on Wednesday, July 20th, certainly down from $5.014 in mid June, but it was $3.16 at the end of July last year. That’s a 41.36% increase in one year, and 83.60% over the $2.433 in July of 2020. The overall 9.1% inflation number might come down a bit from June’s, but not a lot.
It was back in 2016 that I first noted Heather Long’s article on CNN Money:
The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.
It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.
But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.
I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,[1]U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working … Continue reading not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”
The point is simple: what the public feel is more important than what government officials say. If President Biden and his minions keep telling people that inflation is coming down, but the public keep seeing the prices of everything increase, who are they going to believe, the government, or their own eyes?
The Democrats will try to mealy-mouth the definition of recession, but when recessions come, people feel them, feel them in their bones. The price of everything is going up, and credit is tighter. Rents are increasing, and home purchase prices continue to rise. When people have to put more and more of their paychecks into the gasoline tank, that means less and less in their wallets for other things.
References
| ↑1 | U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. |
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