Tag: employment
Donald Hires Foreign Workers for Mar-a-Lago
So much for his campaign rhetoric about giving U.S. jobs to Americans. The Donald requested permission from the U.S. Labor Department to hire 64 foreign workers in the United States on H-2B visas. Some positions will be paid less than last year, while others will see a 1 percent raise, reports the Palm Beach Post.
U.S. Needs 200,000 More Construction Workers
200,000
Number of construction jobs that are currently unfilled across the United States, Reuters reports. Eight years after the housing bust drove an estimated 30 percent of construction workers into new fields, homebuilders across the country are struggling to find workers at all levels of experience, according to the National Association of Homebuilders. The association estimates that there are approximately 200,000 unfilled construction jobs in the U.S. – a jump of 81 percent in the last two years.
PensitoWire
- New York Times: The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind
- TPM Cafe: Face It, We Don’t Have Another Fighter Like Barbara Boxer
- Salon: ‘Has America Gone Crazy?’
- NJ.com: Chris Christie’s Out-of-State Travel Cost Taxpayers at Least $1 Million
- Buzzfeed: Ben Carson’s History Book Plagiarizes SocialismSucks.Net And Many Other Sources
- Huffington Post: Latest GOP Obamacare Bill Could Add $53 Billion To Deficit, CBO Says
Initial Jobless Claims Fall to Lowest Level Since Clinton Left Office
“The number of people who applied for U.S. jobless benefits fell 23,000 to 264,000 in the week that ended Oct. 11, hitting the lowest level since April 2000, showing that employers are laying off few workers, according to government data released Thursday,” Marketwatch reports. April 2000 was three months after Pres. Clinton left office. The chart above from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that employment never recovered during the six years Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. The chart also shows that unemployment surged in advance of the financial collapse on Bush’s watch and only began to recover very slowly after the Stimulus kicked in. It’s impossible to say how much more quickly employment might have rebounded if Republicans in Congress and GOP governors hadn’t deliberately stalled the recovery by cutting funding to government services and employment.
More from Marketwatch:
Borrow and Spend Policies of Bush, GOP Caused Employment’s Downward Slide
As we noted here last week, a new Quinnipiac poll found that voters blame George Bush over Pres. Obama for the economic crisis by 54 to 27 percent. Another 8 percent said they blamed neither president, 7 percent said they blamed both and 3 percent said they did not know or had no answer.
On a political level, what the chart above shows is the result of the Republicans’ strategy of “starving the beast” — or, as their cult leader du jour Grover Norquist put it, shrinking the government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub.
It should not be surprising that only about half of Americans can remember who was responsible for the economic downturn, which happened way back in history, you know, three or four years ago. We are living in what Gore Vidal has called the “United States of Amnesia,” after all.
Sadly, what is surprising is that the percentage of Americans who remember Bush’s mishandling of the economy remains so high.
Since Bush left office in January 2009, two factors have been scrubbing away in tandem at the record of failure that was the Bush presidency, glossing it over and spiffing it up.
