In the week ending July 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 386,000, an increase of 34,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 352,000.
Looking at the chart, you can see, a relatively healthy economy (a Bush economy before the recession of 2008) has a "new benefits" rate of around the 300,000 mark (per week). From a survey of other factors, we learn that during the Bush years, the workforce functioned at a much higher rate, that unemployment ran close to 4.8% on average, that GDP plugged along at 2.5 to 3.5 percent, annually but saw growth for 54 consecutive months, the greatest record of its kind in American history.
By contrast, the Obama economy (after the recessionary years of '09 and '10) is typified by 380,000 new benefit claims per week, an 8.2% unemployment rate, a workforce that is much smaller (8 million workers less than during the Bush years), a real GDP that averages less than 1.8% annually, a financial downgrade for the first time in American history, and a presidential staff that has no clue as to what to do next.
Understand that when Obama brags about taking us back from the edge of the cliff, pulling us away from 750,000 job losses per month to the creation of 80,000 new jobs, monthly, he misinforms on two levels.
First, there was only one month at 750,000 lost jobs and two or three in the high 600,000 range. Moving from a minus 750,000 to a plus 80,000 is not the mark of a recovering economy, it is the mark of a stagnant economy. Look, a country can only lose hundred of thousands of jobs for so long, and then, there are no more jobs to lose. If "jobs" could be measured as water in a barrel, we must conclude there is no more water in the barrel. No jobs, no leakage!! How is that an improvement? And those 8 million folks who have left the work force, they have not come back, either.
A second scam put out by this Administration is the fantasy that it has had something to do with the 80,000 jobs "created" each month. Of course that is a laughable bit of revisionist history. The secular and non-government world of business does not functions with help from this government. The Stimulus money is long gone, and the EPA, OSHA, and the FTA are all busy ordering the business community around. Obama has shut down new oil production on all government lands, he is in the process of killing off the coal industry with his new "cap and trade" policies, and, now, he wants to penalize all American investors by raising dividend taxes from 15% to as high as 45%. Such will effect more than 120 million adult Americans, most of which are the middle class of this nation.
We are learning, today (July 19), that he is busy spending our tax money to actually advertise for an expansion of food stamps as he works with the Mexican government to inform its population of his intentions to give illegals even more than in the past including food stamps and lost job benefits,
He intends to have a pitched battle over "taxing the rich," who he defines as earning $120,000 per year after taxes (or a gross of $200,000) and affecting more than 70% of all private jobs creators.
In the above, we have the results and plans of a man who is an anti-capitalist, a man with no business training or experience. The coming election will decide as to whether we are going to continue down this path of idiocy or not.