Core Essays

15 July 2011

Obama Cruelly Threatens to Withhold Social Security Payments

There is no cruelty to match that of a frustrated socialist yearning for control over the People.  Obama has told tens of millions of very frightened seniors on Social Security that if the Republicans do not cave-in and give him a blank check to continue spending massive amounts of taxpayer money and then add much more to the national debt, he may not send out Social Security checks in August.  This is probably an empty threat, but that does not diminish the brutality of it.

By any rational analysis, it is also an absurd threat.  In 2010, Social Security income was $677.1 billion according to the Social Security Fund Trustee's Report.  Social Security outgo was $584.9 billion, which means it had a surplus of income over outgo of $92.2 billion.  That surplus was used to help fund the massive deficit spending on all other government programs, as the Social Security surplus has been used for decades.  Because of this, of the $677.1 billion of income, $108.2 billion is interest on government bonds the Social Security Trust Fund bought to help the government finance its deficits in the general fund for decades.

The Obama administration wants to keep spending money it does not have on such things as
  • the expenses of setting up the bureaucracy and rules for ObamaCare, 
  • setting up the bureaucracy and rules for the Dodd-Frank finance "reform", 
  • paying ethanol, windmill, electric vehicle, solar, and other "green" energy subsidies, 
  • paying higher electric and gasoline bills because it is foolishly convinced by its own propaganda that man is causing a catastrophic global warming, 
  • paying hordes of scientists to prove this false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis,
  • persecuting business with reinvigorated threats of anti-trust actions, 
  • putting more people on Medicaid and Medicare,
  • paying bloated union wages on federal contracts,
  • using the Labor Department to provide site requirements to companies for their expansions while considering only Union Shop states,
  • using the Justice Department to promulgate injustice against the states and the people and discrimination against those not in government-favored minorities,
  • funding universities that long ago became bloated with government money and stopped educating students,
  • promulgating tens of thousands of new regulations which serve no useful purpose but to increase the power of bureaucrats over the People who do not have the time to read the regulations,
  • and providing funding to the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and many other international institutions that do not like the U.S. and hate our Constitution and concept of individual rights.
Apparently, Obama is now telling us that he is so unwilling to stop such foolish spending that he is going to transfer more than the surplus in the Social Security Fund income out to cover these other expenses.  It is his decision to do this which will prevent him from sending out the August Social Security checks!  Actually, I do not think the law will even allow him to do this, but then he is accustomed to ignoring the law, so that does not mean he will not do it.

Let us suppose that he chooses not to use the federal income from income taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, tariffs, gasoline and cigarette taxes, and many other taxes to pay the $108 billion owed the Social Security Fund in current interest payments.  In other words, he might make payments on interest to the Chinese and to investors, but not to the Social Security Fund.  The Social Security surplus of $92.2 billion would then be turned into a small deficit of $16.0 billion.  If he then did not send out that $16.0 billion, but did send out the remaining $568.9 billion of checks, this would mean that 2.8% of Social Security payments would not go out.  But, there is no way that $16 billion shortfall due to the default on the interest payment would not be made up by any President not grasping at power as a lust-driven would-be dictator.

Obama's threat really has struck terror into the hearts of many Americans on Social Security.  This was a totally irresponsible and pernicious act on the part of this cruel and evil man.  It seems to take such people to be the strongest advocates of socialism.  Despite its pretenses of caring for the needs of some of the People, those who pursue this so-called ideal as a career are never actually caring people.

This entire fuss about the debt ceiling is due to the failure of the Senate to produce a budget for over two years.  The House would not produce one either until the Republicans took it over.  But, the Senate and the President have ignored their budget.  Since no agreement has been reached on what the government will spend in 2012, there is no basis for an agreement on what spending cuts will be made to reduce the deficit to some manageable proportion of our GDP.  All we know is that the record over the last three years was for the government to spend an average of more than 24% of GDP, while before 2008, the spending was below 20% of GDP.  Obama and the Democrats appear to want to continue spending much more than 20% of GDP even though that will mean huge on-going deficits.  Apparently, they intend that this funding will be the result of many more continuing resolutions on spending, so they will never have to recognize that the welfare and crony mercantilist government they want is not sustainable.  They can ignore the failure of big government socialism as long as they do not have to produce an actual budget.  Unless, of course, we collapse as Greece is and Italy may be on the verge of doing.


A 4% of GDP reduction in government spending is more than a $600 billion reduction per year.  It is clearly easy for the government to function at its 2007 spending levels, so there is no excuse for spending cuts that are not in the $600 to $700 billion per year range relative to the spending of this year and the two previous years.

11 July 2011

California Cities Cool in Last Decade

Meteorologist Jan Null compared the temperature and precipitation records of the National Climatic Data Center for many California cities for the earlier period of 1971-2000 to the period from 1981-2010.  The later period generally was cooler, with increased precipitation.  The temperature records of rural areas commonly do not show the temperature increases commonly seen in cities due to the urban heat island effect.  When even the temperature of cities is going down on most of our West Coast, this is a dramatic event.  It must have been an especially unwelcome outcome for Jan Null, who is an ardent catastrophic man-made global warming booster.  The results of his study were published in the San Francisco newspaper The Chronicle on 6 July with a very nice graphic by Todd Trumbull.


Null claimed that man-made global warming caused the warming in Redding and Fresno and the warmth there caused cool air to be drawn in from the sea to cool the coastal cities.  Why they would have a cooling effect on Los Angeles and San Diego is surely unclear.  Indeed, warm temperatures in the Central Valley usually are caused by high pressure systems that actually cause winds along the coast to go out to sea and the warming of the coastal areas.  Null was apparently desperate to null out the use of his analysis of the data as a refutation of man-made global warming.

One also has to wonder why the data sets used have a 20-year period of overlap.  That 20-year overlap with only 10 years on the earlier end or on the later end, should cause any net cooling effect from 2001 to 2010 compared to the start period for the last cycle of warming claimed generally from 1971 to 1980 to be minimized.  Perhaps that was the point of the long overlap.

Given California's problems with insufficient water supply, the increased precipitation in most of the areas ought to be a positive thing, rather than a catastrophe.  I will not claim the drop in temperatures is a good thing, but it sure does take some wind out of the sails of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists who are always using temperature increases, either real or due to urban heat island effects, as evidence that CO2 emissions are going to kill the planet.

Actually, if the increased precipitation is raising the humidity enough, it is possible that the lowered temperatures do not actually mean a reduction of heat energy.  This is because more humid air can hold a lot more energy at a given temperature than drier air.  But, the man-made global warming alarmists do not take note of this when they use any warming of air to claim that it was caused by man's CO2 emissions.

09 July 2011

The Obama Jobs Catastrophe Continues in June

Once again this June's unemployment numbers, offer no indication that the very high employment rates of the last three and a half years are abating or improving.  Despite the wild-eyed claims of the Obama administration, the Stimulus Bills and the drunken spending of the federal government over this period has resulted in no jobs growth improvements.  Combining these wasteful transfers of wealth from the private sector to the control of the government with the expenses and uncertainties of ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank finance reform bill, the concerted efforts to force us to go abroad more and more for oil and gas while leaving extensive fields undeveloped at home and rejecting Canadian offers of tar sand oil, the efforts to bankrupt all of the coal-fired electric plants, the increased threat of anti-trust lawsuits, the developed world's highest corporate tax rate, a Justice Department bent only upon injustice, mandates for the use of unreliable and very expensive energy at unattainable levels in the near future, and myriad other anti-business and anti-earning-a-living efforts, has had just the impact on employment anyone not brain-dead would expect.

The employment numbers for June 2011 are shown in the table below based on the more job-inclusive household survey data, which is not here seasonally adjusted.  The Jun 2011 data is best compared to the July 2010 data to see if there has been any improvement in jobs creation over the past year under Obama's watch.


In making that comparison, the unemployment rate seems to have fallen from 13.75% in July 2010 to the June 2011 rate of 9.32%.   Unfortunately, this is only because many more people have given up on finding employment in that time.  It is more significant to note that 140,134,000 people were employed full-time in July 2010, while only 140,129,000 were employed in June 2011.  This is an actual decrease in the number of Americans employed by 5,000.  That is not a significant decrease, unless you take it in the context that the civilian working age population increased by 1.6 million people in that time!  A stagnant economy at least creates jobs enough to employ those of the growing population who want to work.  The effects of the socialist policies to remove vast wealth and decision-making power from the private sector to the government have produced an economy that cannot even keep up with population growth, let alone actually make progress on recovering from the Great Socialist Recession.

Based on January 2000 when the economy was robust and the existence of good jobs enticed many Americans to take jobs and the unemployment rate was a meaningful 4.0%, we can calculate how many jobs we would need now to have a similar good job economy.  The number of missing jobs now is 21,502,000, which is 1,084,000 more missing jobs than in July 2010.  One would have to say that Obama's so-called effort to "create jobs" is actually a job-destruction effort, which is very effective in doing that.  After any normal recession, the private sector makes adjustments and comes roaring back.  Obama has strangled the lion's roar.

An unemployment rate of 13.3% based on the number of missing jobs is a much more realistic unemployment rate than the 9.2% rate given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Obama administration.  To that we have to add the 8.9 million employed only part time for economic reasons, according to the BLS.  They want full-time jobs, but cannot find them.  This makes a full-time job shortage of at least 18.8%. This still does not count the many millions of Americans working at jobs for which they are educationally and by experience over-qualified.

As has been historical demonstrated over and over, socialism is a disaster for people who want to earn a decent living, over and above the value many of us attach to our liberties and other aspects of being able to manage our own lives.

05 July 2011

American Exceptionalism in the Moral Foundation of the Declaration of Independence

The United States of America is unusual in that it became a nation comparatively recently and  its People have maintained a similar philosophy of government, at least implicitly, throughout its lifetime.  For decades, however, the Progressive Elitists have been working hard to change that philosophy to one more like that of most nation-states and their societies.  What is the keystone of the American philosophy of government and why would Progressive Elitists want to change it?

The Declaration of Independence clearly spelled out the central fact of the exceptional American Principle of Government.  Without this great and noble document, our Constitution cannot be viewed in its proper context and becomes a much weakened limit on the scope and powers of government.  The United States of America were declared independent of Great Britain on 4 July 1776 with a very exceptional purpose in the annals of nations.  Other nations simply had a government controlled by aristocrats, commonly in an alliance with high-level clergy, who were empowered to protect the people and take care of them, at least in theory.  Our first founding document, The Declaration of Independence, clearly and emphatically states that a legitimate government is the tool of the People as the holders of sovereign, equal individual rights to protect and defend their rights.  This is the first part of the exceptional American Principle of Government.


Let us read this straight from the Declaration of Independence:
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are surfferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
Legitimate government secures our individual unalienable rights.  Government cannot take our rights away from us and it certainly cannot give them to us.  Our rights are the result of our nature as thinking individuals who must use our independent minds to survive and to choose the values that we will act to gain or to keep.  At that time, it was assumed that the nature of man was given to man by a god, so therefore God was the giver of rights.  Prior to the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War in Europe, Americans had long been neglected by the government of Great Britain.  They had developed their own legislatures and had taxed themselves very lightly under local governments of very limited scope for a long time.  When Great Britain awoke to the fact that the Colonies had become rather well off and could be taxed to help pay off the huge war debt from the Seven Years War, they levied new taxes and sent of a swarm of new officers to the Colonies to tell Americans what they could and could not do.  By the standards of Americans then, the government of Great Britain had become illegitimate because it was violating the individual rights of the People.

The Constitution was ordained and established by the People as our second form of government in 1789 after they had found that the first form of government under the Articles of Confederation was somewhat too weak.  The People wanted a federal government more capable of providing defense, without too heavy a dependence upon the states.  They found it necessary to prevent the states from violating the property rights of the People and from prohibiting or impeding their trading with one another in commerce.  They needed a government more capable of dealing with foreign powers.  They needed a government to help them establish courts to handle disputes across state lines, nationwide postal service with post roads, patent laws, provide a common coinage, and common weights and measures so that the People in the various states might have some basic rules and means to develop more commerce with one another.

This was still a government of very limited scope and with a few, carefully enumerated powers.  This was not a government that gave the People certain rights.  It was the People, with their rights already in hand, who ordained and established the government.  That government had such limited powers precisely because the People knew that strong governments with wide-ranging powers become the greatest threat to individual rights.  Such governments always seek to expand their powers.  The People knew from history that freedom was lost in Greece and in Rome, for  instance, to  governments which had acquired too much power.  They knew of many other abuses of government power from British history.  The Americans were fortunate to know these things and fortunate to generally have escaped the indoctrination of government-run schools.

The Constitution has its moral foundation in the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution had to provide for a government with no more than minimal powers and scope or the government operating under it would necessarily become an instrument to violate the rights of the individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  This is the second part of the exceptional American Principle of Government, which was explained in the Declaration of Independence somewhat and enacted in the Constitution.  This must happen because the Rule of Law must apply to all, but few laws can be written to accommodate the highly differentiated and complex natures of thinking Men.  The Rule of Law requires that every law apply equally to every Man.

There are only a few laws that can comply with this requirement, however.  For instance, a law might say that no Man may initiate the use of force against another.  Such a law is consistent with the General Welfare since it is necessary for the protection of each and every Man's rights.  But once government takes on powers beyond the protection of the rights of every man, then every law becomes one to promote a special interest rather than the General Welfare.  For instance, a law of the form: Every Man with an income greater than $250,000 will pay a higher tax rate on his income than any Man with a lower income, is a special interest law, which violates the General Welfare by only addressing the welfare of those making less than $250,000 of income a year.  A law that requires a doctor to treat a patient who does not have enough money to pay for his treatment is another such special interest law which does not satisfy the condition that it provide for the General Welfare.  The doctor's right to his own Life and how he will spend the hours of it is violated.  He is not at Liberty to Pursue his own Happiness under such law.  This is a clear violation of the doctor's equal and sovereign individual rights.  The requirement by law that one must purchase a health insurance plan approved by government is a clear violation of the right of every Man to own his own life and to manage his own health care needs.  Some, for instance, might rationally be wealthy enough to be self-insured.  Others might have no need for a low-deductible policy or for mental health care.  Some may not need pre-natal care.  Individuals have differing needs and their values will differ accordingly.  Government laws under progressive governments deny these basic facts of reality.

The Constitution recognizes the importance of the Rule of Law applying equally to everyone many times.  It refers to the General Welfare as a requirement that must be provided for whenever any of the limited powers of government are executed.  The government is authorized to build military facilities, but it is not authorized to have the Speaker of the House give the construction contract to his son-in-law at three times the lowest responsible bid cost.  For him to do so, would be a violation of the General Welfare and of the Rule of Law.  The many laws that apply to all Americans except the members of Congress and/or their staff, are another example of special interest law in violation of the General Welfare and the Rule of Law.  Similarly, the award of government contracts only to those paying union wages is another obvious violation of the moral rule stated in the Declaration of Independence.

There is a presumption of liberty for the individual in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The long list of grievances against the interferences of Great Britain make this clear in the Declaration of Independence.  The entire effort to limit the powers and scope of government in the Constitution makes this clear in that document.  The long list of rights the government acknowledged in the Bill of Rights is another recognition of this fact, especially given the 9th Amendment which says:
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This amendment clearly states that the government is not the source of individual rights.  The government has the duty to recognize and honor the unalienable rights of the every individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  The Declaration of Independence even implied that there were other rights not covered by that very broad combination of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness when it precedes that list of rights with "among these are."  I am not sure what rights are not covered by that list, which does cover many rights not listed in the Bill of Rights, but this is another strong example of the presumption of liberty which legitimate government must not violate.

The Declaration of Independence is a critically foundational document of the exceptional American Principle of Government.  Its moral principles provide the real backbone to the Constitution.  If one can eliminate the Declaration of Independence from our understanding of our moral duty as citizens and as a definition of legitimate government, then the Constitution is greatly weakened and becomes more subject to changing interpretations and tortured mutations of constitutional law and precedent. 

The central purpose of the Progressive Elitist is to make government much more powerful and to put it to the endless task of providing goodies for an endless list of special interests.  That list presently includes government employees, labor unions, big financial and car outfits with special protection by government against their bad business decisions, trial lawyers, government-run school teachers, non-competitive energy providers, ethanol refiners and blenders, farmers with subsidized crops, tariff-protected industries, low income housing users, high income housing owners who want green space, zoning laws, and building codes to keep lower income people away from their neighborhoods, and the unemployed who like sitting at home on unemployment benefits.  None of this is consistent with the General Welfare or the Rule of Law.  It is just faction against faction to win special interests at the expense of violating the individual rights of others.

Obama very clearly explained that he does not like the Constitution which is a barrier to his central purpose of redistributing the wealth by taking some of the People's time, money, and property and giving it to others of his choosing.  Vice President Biden explicitly stated that there are no such things as Natural Rights.  Rights are given to People by the government he says.  Of course, this means that People do not have unalienable rights.  If the Declaration of Independence is wrong about that, then it is also perhaps wrong in claiming that the People have equal rights.  It is certainly wrong in the minds of such Progressive Elitists for the Declaration of Independence to define legitimate government as that government that protects the equal rights of the individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  These two men are very aware that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution form a very strong front against their idea of government.  Indeed, Progressive Elitists very often claim the Declaration of Independence has no standing in the law.  How odd a claim this is given that it is the moral foundation upon which the Constitution rests.  But, as with a fortress, the Constitution is no stronger than its foundation.

The 9th Amendment has been virtually struck from the Constitution by Progressive judges.  Even the explicitly enumerated rights of the individual in the Bill of Rights have been split into categories which deserve strong protection and those which are mere after-thoughts.  Any right to pursue one's happiness through commerce is now completely subject to the whim of the government.  That means that the People have lost all of their economic rights, which most people spend many hours a day pursuing.  Clearly, such rights must be denied by a government that presumes to choose the People's values and to micromanage their lives with Central Planners.  This is the goal of the Progressive Elitists.  Obama is particularly derogatory about people who pursue their happiness in part by making money or creating wealth.  This predilection against commerce explains why he has proven so effective in destroying the jobs many Americans once had in the private sector.

Note also that the Declaration of Independence says the People have a moral duty to change the form of their government if it becomes illegitimate by violating their rights.  This is a very scary idea for a Progressive Elitist who desperately wants to dictate our values to us and force us to live in accordance with those mandated values.  He believes the People are generally unable to wisely choose their values and are not up to managing their own lives well.  He lacks the faith of the Declaration of Independence in the People.

It is interesting in this light to note the study by two Harvard University professors, David Yanagizawa-Drott and Andreas Madestam in which they found that

The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century. Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party. Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans.
There are plenty of Progressive Elitists in the Republican Party, but they tend to be less radical than those in the Democrat Party and fewer in percentage.  The impact of 4th of July parades on the People that pushes them toward the Republicans is due to there being less resistance among Republicans to the ideas of our Declaration of Independence.  These ideas are still more in sync with those of the Tea Party.  It is these ideas that make Americans exceptional.  The Democrats have a great deal of difficulty seeing American principles as exceptional because they have dismissed all of our American principles and hold none that are unique to America.  Their core values all hinge on an aristocracy of college-indoctrinated elitists running the country by controlling its all-powerful government.  This is a variant of the Medieval concept of government that long-preceded the Scottish and French Enlightenment philosophy found in the Declaration of Independence.  The peasants in their society are the many who received just enough indoctrination in the government-run schools that they will be docile in obeying the government they are told has only their best interest at heart.  Such docile peasants bear no resemblance to the Americans of our founding period.

It is a fine thing to remember the great deeds of our veterans on the 4th of July, but let us also remember that we are celebrating the great and critically important ideas of the Declaration of Independence on that wonderful day.  They are the moral foundation of our Constitution and they inform of us of when our government is legitimate and when it is our moral duty to reform it.  It is clear that our present government is not legitimate and that we must reform it.  We must carry this realization with us into the election of 2012 and do our duty as defined by the most exceptional and moral American Principle of Government.  It is time to stand for that American Principle of Government as the Winter Soldiers did in our Great American Revolution.

03 July 2011

The Hidden Grimness of the State Unemployment Numbers

The government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has released the state by state unemployment figures for May 2011 and compared them to May 2010.  In the 15 states they reported a significant change in jobs, they reported lower unemployment rates.  Changes in jobs in the other 35 states were not significant according to the BLS and will not be discussed here.  A critical review of the numbers shows this interpretation of the unemployment situation to be the work of flim-flam artists. 

Perhaps this should not surprise us in view of the control over the Dept. of Labor exercised by labor unions and the partisanship widely on the loose in the Obama administration.  The reality of the state by state review here is a grim one, but one with some useful information for job seekers.  Of course this analysis is also important for anyone deceived by the impression that the jobs situation is slowly improving.  It is actually getting worse.  At the national level I showed this to be the case here, noting that there are 693,000 more missing jobs in May 2011 than there were in May 2010.  There is no job creation adequate to keep up with the population growth of the nation.

The BLS reported that 665,400 more people were employed in May 2011 compared to May 2010 in these 15 states.  They reported that 87,300 more people were employed in California in May 2011 than in May 2010.  They used seasonally adjusted job numbers, but that should not matter given that they were comparing a May to a May.  I decided to check whether the same result would be found using the Work Force numbers and the Unemployed numbers which were not seasonally adjusted.  Since the Work Force is the sum of the Employed and the Unemployed (as recognized by the BLS), one can subtract the Unemployed from the Work Force and find the seasonally unadjusted Employed numbers for each state.  One wonders why the Employed numbers are not given directly if one expects transparency.  Transparency, much promised by Obama, is the last thing one gets from Obama and his followers.

So, what do we find for the jobs added in California over the last year?  We find that there are 40,100 fewer people employed, not 87,300 more people employed.  The state of Washington is another for which positive change in net jobs is reported as 19,600, but there was actually a loss of 32,100 jobs from May to May!  Overall, in the 15 states the BLS says added 665,400 jobs, only 333,100 were actually added.  This is almost exactly half the reported number of jobs added.  Of the 15 states reported to have lower unemployment, only 3 created as many jobs as the BLS said they did.  Examine the numbers in the table below:


The next to the last column provides the change in the Civilian Labor Force.  In any case in which the number is negative, people have either given up looking for employment or they have left the state, presumably for employment or in the hope of employment elsewhere.  In 9 of the 15 states in which Obama's BLS has claimed an improvement in the unemployment rate, this number is negative.  The only large positive number belongs to the state of Texas.  Nebraska's positive number is significant given the small population of the state.  But, note that California lost 149,500 people in its workforce, which means the situation in California is particularly grim.  The loss of 58,500 people in the workforce in Washington and of 76,600 in Michigan are also very grim signs.  Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma also had large losses.  For the 15 states that supposedly had improvements in their unemployment rates, there was a net reduction in the civilian labor force of 247,000 people. 

Of course this could mean our population is shrinking, but that is most unlikely.  What it means in net is that people have given up on finding a job and the BLS no longer counts them in the workforce.  If they are no longer in the workforce, then they do not count in the calculation of the unemployment rate.  State by state, it could mean that people simply moved out of a state.  But if this list really has all of the states in it with statistically significant changes in jobs and they are all reported as positive changes, then it would be very odd of people to migrate to those states which are statistically known not to be creating jobs.  No, it is clear that the effect is that the unemployed have lost all Hope under the regime of this most hyped Hope President.

At this point, you might be thinking that the Obama administration just exaggerated the job additions by a factor of two, but there was still a bit of improvement in the job situation.  If so, you have missed a very important consideration.  From 2000 to 2010, our population grew at an average rate of 0.94% a year.  Assuming that each state on our list of 15 significant job growth states according to the BLS grew at the national average, each of those states would have to add 0.0094 times the number of employed people in May 2010 just to provide the jobs needed to keep up with the growing population.  I calculated that number in the last column.  California needed 150,196 added jobs to tread water, but it lost 40,100 jobs to fall behind by 190,296 jobs.  The state of Washington needed to add a net of 30,042, but it lost 32,100 to fall behind by a total of 62,142 jobs.  Failures such as these are why the jobs situation for the young is particularly awful.


Only 6 of the 15 states the BLS told us had an improving unemployment situation have created more jobs than they needed to to stay even with expected population growth.  They are, with the number of jobs they added above the number needed to accommodate average population growth:

Ohio, 21,807 jobs
Oregon, 16,076 jobs
Texas, 9,439 jobs
Nebraska, 4,480 jobs
North Dakota, 1,418 jobs
Wyoming, 38 jobs

It should be noted that Wisconsin almost met its goal to keep up with normal population growth.

First of all, noting that we were missing 21,484,000 jobs in May 2011, these six states creating more jobs than they need to keep up with population growth actually have very few jobs to meet the demand for jobs.  In addition, these states have their own unemployed.  But, if you are able to relocate to a state where the job situation is not hopeless, you may want to consider these states.  The North Dakota and Wyoming job markets are very small, so you should go to one of the top four states on the list baring unusual job preferences and skills.  Ohio and Oregon are somewhat surprising.  Everyone knows that Texas has been a job creator, but once you discount the false claim by the BLS that Texas created 205,400 jobs from May to May with the actual number of 114,300 jobs, the Texas phenomena is reduced to its being one of the few states to simply keep up with expected average population growth in job creation.

Now you can appreciate how truly ludicrous it is for Obama and his administration and his Democrat allies to make the claim that they are making progress on reducing the horrific unemployment.  It is their determined anti-business and anti-wealth-creation mindset that has kept us from recovering from this Great Socialist Recession and kept business from hiring.  Obama and those who share his socialist viewpoint have made a lifetime point of not understanding business and economics because they believe creating money is immoral.  But, earning money by offering others the values they want in the private sector is both moral and necessary.  The results of the Obama vendetta against people earning a livelihood have been brutal to the General Welfare in the extreme.  Not surprisingly, they do not want us to understand just how brutal they have been.

We must make every effort to remember these painful facts throughout this coming election cycle and work hard at explaining the reality to others.  If we are not successful, Obama and his Democrat allies will continue to wreck havoc on the People of the United States.