9,000 more bumps in the road.
WASHINGTON — The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose by the most in a month, signaling growing weakness in the job market.
Applications rose by 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the second increase in three weeks and the 11th straight week that applications have been above 400,000.
It’s a good thing we passed that trillion dollar stimulus, huh?
Try as they might, there is no way to put a shine on this.
US private employers added a paltry 13,000 jobs in June, compared to a revised gain of 57,000 in May, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Thursday.
The May figure was originally reported as a gain of 55,000.
The median of estimates from 30 economists surveyed by Reuters for the ADP Employer Services report, jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers, was for a rise of 60,000 private-sector jobs in June.
The ADP figures come ahead of the government’s much more comprehensive labor market report on Friday.
That report is expected to show a fall in nonfarm payrolls of 110,000 in June overall, as many temporary workers hired to complete the government’s decennial census were laid off.
Recovery summer!
New unemployment claims spiked by 25,000 last week.
WASHINGTON — The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The big surge was a setback to hopes that layoffs were declining.
The Labor Department says that applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain of 40,000 in February.
The forecast had been for claims to fall by around 4,000 from the previous week. The unexpectedly large rise in new claims underscored that even though the economy is growing, improvements in the labor market are coming in fits and starts.
Obama’s alma mater was only second to UMASS in its porkulus cash.
Massachusetts’ top universities and hospitals are getting a healthy dose of federal stimulus spending, leaving some hard-hit blue-collar workers wondering where the money is for “shovel ready” construction jobs
The University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Boston universities, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital all ranked within the top 20 list of state recipients of federal stimulus funds last quarter – hauling in a combined $554 million in government grants, according to a Herald review.
The vast majority of the money to universities and hospitals is slated for cutting-edge scientific and medical research as well as purchases of high-tech lab equipment, according to federal data.
A large chunk of UMass’ money went to general operations, to avoid hundreds of layoffs at the system’s schools, while tens of millions of dollars is earmarked for medical and scientific research.
It’s hard to complain about hospitals such as Children’s or Dana Farber receiving funds that will go toward advancing medical research for curing cancer or juvenile diabetes, but this is not what we were told the money was for.
It appears as though Evan Bayh isn’t buying the jobs saved or created BS coming from the White House, either.
Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) is retiring, but he’s not the retiring type, ridiculing congressional job creation efforts on “The Early Show.”
You may recall Scott Brown making the same claim during his swearing-in news presser which brought on cries of foul from the White House, lefty bloggers and the MSM. As with Bayh, Brown was referring to private sector jobs – not hacks whose jobs were “saved” with stimulus cash.
Bayh has left Democrats in a major pickle and now they are out for blood.
“It is hard to stomach lectures from Sen. Bayh on Jobs. For most Americans, if they were as unproductive in their jobs as Bayh has been in his, they wouldn’t have the luxury of quitting — they would be fired.”
Bitter much? Pass the popcorn!
Scroll for updates
Nice going Arizona 9th!
Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.
There’s one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.
There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.
Did ACORN prepare this report?
UPDATE #1: The Heritage Foundation has a roundup of the bogus districts.
Forget everything bad you’ve ever heard about President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus. Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.
The it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-our-tax-dollars-at-stake punch line here is that none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist. Yet those jobs “created or saved” claims still sit on the Obama administration’s official “transparency and accountability” website Recovery.gov. As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso points out, it would have been nearly costless for the Recovery.gov site designers to limit the input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts never made it into the public domain, but for whatever reason the Obama administration chose otherwise. Defending the fake data on his website, Recovery.gov Communications Director Ed Pound told ABC News: “We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on job numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.”
Riiight.
Update #2:
You can track the deception with this nifty Bogus Jobs Map courtesy of the Washington Examiner.
And that’s just a sampling.
Via Ace of Spades.
– $3.4 million for a 13-foot tunnel for turtles and other wildlife attempting to cross U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, Fla.
– $1.15 million to install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, Okla.
– $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, Pa., that has not been used for three decades.
– $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
– $6 million for a snow-making facility in Duluth, Minn.
– $173,834 to weatherize eight pickup trucks in Madison County, Ill.
– $20,000 for a fish sperm freezer at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery in South Dakota.
– $380,000 to spay and neuter pets in Wichita, Kan.
Bob Barker must be so happy.
You don’t say.
WASHINGTON (AP) – An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.
The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.
The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
_ A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.
_ A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.
_ A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.
There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president’s promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.
The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.
The White House says it is aware there are problems. In an interview, Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.
“If there’s an error that was made, let’s get it fixed,” DeSeve said.
The White House released a statement early Thursday that it said laid out the “real facts” about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago. It said that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected “virtually all” the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes “does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday.”
The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.
As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.
It’s not clear just how far off the 30,000 claim was. The AP’s review was not an exhaustive accounting of all 9,000 contracts, but homed in on the most obvious cases where there were indications of duplications or misinterpretations. Keep reading.
Fuzzy math.
I’m really confused because I thought the stimulus saved us from a depression…..and that without it unemployment would soar to 8.5%. Ummm.
The most famous Friend of Angelo was on Meet The Press this morning and said that the billions in compensation which Goldman Sachs plans to pay out this year is an outrage.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Financial companies that were shored up by taxpayer money are now paying their employees big bucks in compensation and benefits.
The chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee says that’s a source of outrage in the country.
One company that has received government money, Goldman Sachs, has said it has set aside $16.7
billion for compensation so far this year. That’s more than a half-million dollars per employee.
Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut says such companies need to understand that what they are doing is an outrage. Dodd says the government should look into taking action to get those companies to back up and reconsider what they are paying out.
Dodd may want to think long and hard about stepping into the fray on this one. After all, it was Dodd who was responsible for adding language to the porkulus bill which allowed for $165 million in bonuses for AIG employees….which he admitted to adding after he was busted for lying about it.
Pot, meet kettle.
SPITFIRE MURPHY 