South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The “Fiscal Cliff” And the Middle Class

The Real News Network reports on how the deal to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” harms middle-class families in the United States [via Naked Capitalism].

A Sobering Forecast

Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute recently offered a sobering forecast about the state of the American labor market in 2013.

… Using the ratio of the over-the-year unemployment rate to the official unemployment rate in 2011, we can project the over-the-year unemployment rate for 2012 and 2013. It is likely that 13.1 percent of the workforce, or more than one in eight workers, will be unemployed at some point next year [2013].

How Droll

The Economist isn’t a fan of the recent deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

True Beliefs …

James Kwak of The Baseline Scenario doesn’t think that the Democratic Party believes much in preserving social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare.

But those tax cuts came at the expense of future federal tax revenues, which means they came at the expense of—you guessed it—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In other words, Obama and the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress chose goodies for low-, middle-, upper-, and very-upper-income families today (the only people not getting goodies are the super-upper-income families that make more than $450,000*) over the fiscal capacity required to preserve our social insurance and safety net programs.
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That’s the problem with the tax deal—not the fact that the threshold was set at $450,000 rather than $250,000, which Krugman correctly notes doesn’t make much of a difference. And you can’t say the tax cuts were a necessary choice to keep the economy from slipping into recession. If that were the case, they should have been temporary, not permanent, and Obama has been trying to make them permanent since 2010.
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The Democratic Party today, as I’ve said countless times over the past year, has become the party of smallish government and tax cuts for most people, while the Republican Party is the party of tiny government and tax cuts for everyone. There is no party dedicated to the New Deal and the Great Society. We need one.

Job Openings In October 2012

From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the October 2012 version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) …

The October Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed job openings increased in October by 128,000, to 3.7 million. However, the number of job seekers also increased in October—170,000 were added to the ranks of the unemployed, bringing the October total to 12.3 million (unemployment data are from the Current Population Survey and can be found here). Taken together, this means the “job-seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—ticked down slightly in October to 3.3-to-1 from the September ratio of 3.4-to-1.
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The job-seekers ratio has been improving fairly steadily since its peak of 6.7-to-1 in July 2009. Despite this improvement, odds remain stacked against job seekers; the ratio has been 3-to-1 or greater for more than four years. A job-seekers ratio above 3-to-1 means there are no jobs for more than two out of three unemployed workers. To put today’s ratio of 3.3-to-1 in perspective, it is useful to note that the highest the ratio ever got in the early 2000s downturn was 2.9-to-1 in September 2003. In a labor market with strong job opportunities, the ratio would be close to 1-to-1, as it was in December 2000 (when it was 1.1-to-1).