SECRETARY JOHN KERRY
Secretary Kerry is on foreign travel to Muscat, Oman. Secretary Kerry is
accompanied by Spokesperson Psaki and VADM Harry B. Harris, Jr., JCS.
Please click here for more information.
2:15 p.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry meets with Sultan of Oman Qaboos bin Said Al Said, in Muscat, Oman.
(CAMERA SPRAY PRECEDING MEETING)
3:15 p.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry attends a lunch hosted by Sultan of Oman Qaboos bin Said Al Said, in Muscat, Oman.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
5:15 p.m. LOCAL Secretary Kerry participates in a bilateral meeting with Sultan of Oman Qaboos bin Said Al Said, in Muscat, Oman.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
DEPUTY SECRETARY BILL BURNS
12:00 p.m. Deputy Secretary Burns meets with Secretary of the
Security Council of the Russian Federation General Nikolay Platonovich
Patrushev, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
2:00 p.m. Deputy Secretary Burns meets with Australia Defense Minister Stephen Smith, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
UNDER SECRETARY FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS WENDY SHERMAN
Under Secretary Sherman is on foreign travel to Jakarta, Indonesia. Please click here for more information.
UNDER SECRETARY FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH, ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT ROBERT HORMATS
8:00 a.m. Under Secretary Hormats delivers remarks at the U.S.-New
Zealand Pacific Partnership Forum, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, in
Washington, DC.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
9:30 a.m. Under Secretary Hormats delivers remarks at the USAID Water and Development Strategy Launch, on Capitol Hill.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
2:00 p.m. Under Secretary Hormats holds a conference call with
John Watson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Chevron, at the
Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
5:00 p.m. Under Secretary Hormats attends a farewell reception in
honor of USTR Ambassador Demetrios Marantis, at the Office of the
United States Trade Representative.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
UNDER SECRETARY FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS TARA SONENSHINE
10:00 a.m. Under Secretary Sonenshine participates in a signing
ceremony for a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Endowment
for the Humanities, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
11:30 a.m. Under Secretary Sonenshine addresses the 2013 Charles B. Rangel Fellows, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
CHIEF OF PROTOCOL AMBASSADOR CAPRICIA PENAVIC MARSHALL
12:00 p.m. Ambassador Marshall attends a luncheon hosted by the
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, honoring the 2013 Recipient
of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize Carole King, at the Library of
Congress.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
7:00 p.m. Ambassador Marshall receives the Order of the Cross of
Isabel la Catolica by the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain His
Excellency Ramón Gil-Casares, at a ceremony in Washington, DC.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR SOUTH AND CENTRAL ASIAN AFFAIRS ROBERT BLAKE
10:00 a.m. Assistant Secretary Blake joins Secretary of Homeland
Secuirty Janet Napolitano’s bilateral meeting with Indian Home Minister
Sushilkumar Shinde, at the Homeland Security Office.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
2:00 p.m. Assistant Secretary Blake meets with Finland Ambassador Tuula Yrjola, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS AFFAIRS JOSE FERNANDEZ
Assistant Secretary Fernandez is on foreign travel from May 19 through
31 to Mexico City, Mexico; Ankara, Turkey; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and
Madrid, Spain. Please click here for more information.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR WESTERN HEMISPHERE AFFAIRS ROBERTA JACOBSON
8:00 a.m. Assistant Secretary Jacobson attends a meeting at the Pentagon.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
3:30 p.m. Assistant Secretary Jacobson meets with U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Phyllis Powers, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR OCEANS AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL AND SCIENTIFIC AFFAIRS KERRI-ANN JONES
Assistant Secretary Jones is on foreign travel to Geneva, Switzerland
from May 20 through 22 and Galway, Ireland from May 23 through 25.
Please click here for more information.
8:30 a.m. LOCAL Assistant Secretary Jones attends the 66th World Health Assembly, in Geneva, Switzerland.
ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POLITICAL-MILITARY AFFAIRS THOMAS KELLY
10:30 a.m. Acting Assistant Secretary Kelly delivers remarks to Colorado Thirty Group, at the Capitol Visitors’ Center in Washington, DC.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POPULATION, REFUGEES AND MIGRATION ANNE CLAIRE RICHARD
Assistant Secretary Richard is on foreign travel to Ecuador and Colombia through May 23. Please click here for more information.
ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR EAST ASIAN AND PACIFIC AFFAIRS JOSEPH YUN
Acting Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Yun is on foreign travel to
Indonesia, Brunei, and Vietnam May 20-29 for bilateral and multilateral
meetings with senior officials. Please click here for more information.
ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND LABOR UZRA ZEYA
11:00 a.m. Acting Assistant Secretary Zeya meets with Christine
Beerli, Vice President of the International Committee of the Red Cross,
at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE TO MONITOR AND COMBAT TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS LUIS CDEBACA
8:00 a.m. Ambassador CdeBaca meets with Ambassador to Burma, Derek Mitchell, in Washington, DC.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
Ambassador CdeBaca is on foreign travel to Berlin, Germany for the National Rapporteurs on Trafficking in Persons Conference.
AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE AND U.S. GLOBAL AIDS COORDINATOR ERIC GOOSBY
Ambassador Goosby attends the 66th World Health Assembly, in Geneva, Switzerland.
(MEDIA DETERMINED BY HOST)
AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE TO OFFICE OF GLOBAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE STEPHEN RAPP
Ambassador Rapp is on foreign travel in the Democratic Republic of Congo
to attend official meetings regarding global criminal justice issues.
SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR GLOBAL INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS RETA JO LEWIS
12:20 p.m. Special Representative Lewis delivers remarks at the German Marshall Fund about subnational engagement, in Washington, DC.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
DIRECTOR OF POLICY PLANNING DAVID MCKEAN
1:00 p.m. Director McKean meets with Jim Fallows of The Atlantic, at the Department of State.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
3:00 p.m. Director McKean meets with Dr. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington, DC.
(CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE)
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
21 May, 2013: President and VP Schedule
President
9:30 am
The President receives a briefing on the ongoing response to the devastating tornadoes and severe weather that impacted Oklahoma Sunday night and Monday
Oval Office
Closed Press
9:30 am
The President receives a briefing on the ongoing response to the devastating tornadoes and severe weather that impacted Oklahoma Sunday night and Monday
Oval Office
Closed Press
10:00 am
The President delivers a statement on the devastating tornadoes and severe weather that impacted Oklahoma
State Dining Room
Pooled Press
10:15 am
The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press
11:00 am
The President and Vice President meet with DREAMers who have received Deferred Action and U.S. citizen family members of undocumented immigrants
Oval Office
Closed Press
4:30 pm
The President and the Vice Presdent meet with Secretary of Defense Hagel
Oval Office
Closed Press
Vice President
5:30 pm
The Vice President delivers remarks at a reception hosted by the Democratic National Committee in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month
American Institute of Architects
Print Pool
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Rush on Heritage's Immigration Report
RUSH: There's also a move out there -- understandably in the Democrat Party, but within certain elements of the Republican Party -- to go after, discredit, and basically blow up the Heritage Foundation study on immigration and the cost of amnesty. Remember, we made this available to you. If you wanted to go to the Heritage Foundation website the other day, earlier this week, they were giving you the report free. The website was AskHeritage.org. You could go there and you could get the whole thing downloaded, and the five-page summary was really pretty much all you needed to read.
If you didn't want the detail, the summary was just powerful, and it talked about $6.3 trillion of net cost. Well, all kinds of people -- predictably from the Democrat Party, but some in the Republican Party now -- are coming out to discredit this whole thing. They're trying to discredit the scholarship, the math. One of the criticisms is, "Those guys at Heritage, they analyze this in a static way! They didn't calculate any of the dynamics." What they mean by that is, "Wait a minute! Yeah, some of these new arrivals may end up on the welfare rolls but some of them are gonna be paying taxes, too, and that's gonna wash out whatever benefits they get."
That was the theory.
But that doesn't quite wash.
Anyway, that's just what out there.
Now, USA Today in a story here by Alan Gomez. "One of the authors of a Heritage Foundation report that panned a Senate plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws argued in his doctoral dissertation that immigrants generally have lower IQs than the 'native white population' of the United States." Uh-oh. Uh, uh, uh, uh, oh. You see now, the long knives are out for anybody at Heritage who had anything to do with this.
"Jason Richwine, who received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard in 2009 and joined the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2012, wrote in his dissertation titled 'IQ and Immigration Policy' that immigrants in the U.S. have lower IQs than native Americans, and that that difference 'is likely to persist over several generations.'
'The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market,' Richwine wrote, in a story first reported by The Washington Post. 'Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.'"
So now it's trash the messenger time. There is no argument in this piece about whether or not Mr. Richwine's doctoral dissertation is right. They don't even raise that question. They are attempting to discredit Mr. Richwine and the Heritage report by pointing out that this guy, in his doctoral dissertation, suggested that immigrants to America have lower IQs than native Americans and that the difference is likely to persist over several generations. And it's something that we ought to consider when analyzing and coming up with immigration policy. You're not supposed to bring that kind of stuff up. You're just not supposed to talk about it. That's not politically correct. Even if it's true, you are not supposed to bring it up.
So the entire Heritage report on immigration that disagreed with the Senate Gang of Eight plan is under assault now, because one of the authors in his doctoral dissertation wrote that immigrants have lower IQs than native Americans. They don't dispute that in the USA piece, as far as I read, they don't dispute that. Snerdley is asking, "If it's true, shouldn't it have an impact?" Well, maybe in a different era, yeah. But not today. It mighta mattered policy-wise in a different era, but today, no. You're not even supposed to talk about this. We're supposed to reach out. In fact, the lower the IQ, the more welcoming we are to be to show how good we are and compassionate and how understanding. The lower the IQ, the more welcoming we should be.
"Richwine was one of two co-authors in a report released Monday by the Heritage Foundation that predicted a $6.3 trillion economic loss for the U.S. if a Senate immigration bill that would legalize the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants and bring in more foreigners on work visas becomes law. On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation said Richwine's doctoral thesis did not factor into it's report and emphasized that the data used in the study is sound."
So Heritage says, "Whatever he wrote his doctoral thesis on had nothing to do with our report. Our report's about money. The IQ of arriving immigrants is not part of our study. It's not part of our report." Doesn't matter. His doctoral thesis was written about this, and as such, he's automatically discredited as a bigot and a racist and whatever else, and therefore the entire Heritage report is disqualified. That's what's underway in the Drive-By Media.
If you didn't want the detail, the summary was just powerful, and it talked about $6.3 trillion of net cost. Well, all kinds of people -- predictably from the Democrat Party, but some in the Republican Party now -- are coming out to discredit this whole thing. They're trying to discredit the scholarship, the math. One of the criticisms is, "Those guys at Heritage, they analyze this in a static way! They didn't calculate any of the dynamics." What they mean by that is, "Wait a minute! Yeah, some of these new arrivals may end up on the welfare rolls but some of them are gonna be paying taxes, too, and that's gonna wash out whatever benefits they get."
That was the theory.
But that doesn't quite wash.
Anyway, that's just what out there.
Now, USA Today in a story here by Alan Gomez. "One of the authors of a Heritage Foundation report that panned a Senate plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws argued in his doctoral dissertation that immigrants generally have lower IQs than the 'native white population' of the United States." Uh-oh. Uh, uh, uh, uh, oh. You see now, the long knives are out for anybody at Heritage who had anything to do with this.
"Jason Richwine, who received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard in 2009 and joined the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2012, wrote in his dissertation titled 'IQ and Immigration Policy' that immigrants in the U.S. have lower IQs than native Americans, and that that difference 'is likely to persist over several generations.'
'The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market,' Richwine wrote, in a story first reported by The Washington Post. 'Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.'"
So now it's trash the messenger time. There is no argument in this piece about whether or not Mr. Richwine's doctoral dissertation is right. They don't even raise that question. They are attempting to discredit Mr. Richwine and the Heritage report by pointing out that this guy, in his doctoral dissertation, suggested that immigrants to America have lower IQs than native Americans and that the difference is likely to persist over several generations. And it's something that we ought to consider when analyzing and coming up with immigration policy. You're not supposed to bring that kind of stuff up. You're just not supposed to talk about it. That's not politically correct. Even if it's true, you are not supposed to bring it up.
So the entire Heritage report on immigration that disagreed with the Senate Gang of Eight plan is under assault now, because one of the authors in his doctoral dissertation wrote that immigrants have lower IQs than native Americans. They don't dispute that in the USA piece, as far as I read, they don't dispute that. Snerdley is asking, "If it's true, shouldn't it have an impact?" Well, maybe in a different era, yeah. But not today. It mighta mattered policy-wise in a different era, but today, no. You're not even supposed to talk about this. We're supposed to reach out. In fact, the lower the IQ, the more welcoming we are to be to show how good we are and compassionate and how understanding. The lower the IQ, the more welcoming we should be.
"Richwine was one of two co-authors in a report released Monday by the Heritage Foundation that predicted a $6.3 trillion economic loss for the U.S. if a Senate immigration bill that would legalize the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants and bring in more foreigners on work visas becomes law. On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation said Richwine's doctoral thesis did not factor into it's report and emphasized that the data used in the study is sound."
So Heritage says, "Whatever he wrote his doctoral thesis on had nothing to do with our report. Our report's about money. The IQ of arriving immigrants is not part of our study. It's not part of our report." Doesn't matter. His doctoral thesis was written about this, and as such, he's automatically discredited as a bigot and a racist and whatever else, and therefore the entire Heritage report is disqualified. That's what's underway in the Drive-By Media.
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Unemployment Numbers
Rush had lots of interesting things to say about this on Friday. I share the entire transcript.
:
RUSH: Everybody is ecstatic with the jobs numbers today. Unemployment down to seven and a half percent, 165,000 new jobs. Well, it's nothing, but in comparison to what it has been --
(interruption)
It doesn't matter, Snerdley. The media's all atwitter about it. That means the low-information voters are gonna hear that. The real number, nine and a half million fewer jobs since Obama was immaculated. That's how many people are not working, that's how many jobs we've lost, nine and a half million in four and a half years. The sequester. The sequester is what I'm crediting it to. (laughing) If they're gonna talk about how great this news is, then I'm gonna credit the sequester for it. He-he-he. Budget cuts, just to tweak 'em, you know, just to tick 'em off, budget cuts led to massive new job gains! That could be our theme here today. Make 'em prove it isn't the case. Budget cuts, government getting smaller. Ahem. We know it didn't, but this is just how we tweak 'em.
Budget cuts. Look what happens when you cut the budget. People start hiring left and right. That's how, if we wanted to play the game the way they do, that's what I could say. I thought about doing that. But the truth of the matter is that, folks, our buddy Jim Pethokoukis over at AEI: "US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama's health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment."
There's no question that the economy is not creating careers. The economy is creating part-time jobs. Now, Pethokoukis says the American economy added -- by the way, I sit here and I go through all this. I'll give you the truth, but the low-information crowd isn't gonna hear this. The low-information crowd is hearing that the economy's going great guns, that unemployment's down to seven and a half percent, all these new jobs are created. And in terms of it being an electoral factor for Obama, it's not. Obama's still got big, big trouble out there, and he knows it. But that's another subject.
Let me stick with this. "While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month," again, these are government numbers, "according to the separate Household Survey, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons," i.e., "involuntary part-time workers..." That's what the Labor Department calls them: Involuntary part-time workers These are people that have their hours reduced. That number of people employed part time for economic reasons "increased by 278,000 to 7.9 million, largely offsetting a decrease in March.
"These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job." At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate -- which is the number people out of work and the number of people who have given up and are no longer counted in the U-3 number -- that number went up. It's 13.9%.
The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want full-time work, went from 13.8 to 13.9%.
And there's more. There was a two-tenths of an hour decline in the length of the average workweek. I mean, this stuff gets detailed and filled with minutia. But the nut of it here is that it's a part-time economy, and the number of involuntary part-time workers is skyrocketing. Now, remember, the economy added 293,000 jobs last month. The number of people employed part time increased by about the same: 278,000. So we're not adding careers, is how I look at it.
We're adding part-time people whose hours are being reduced because of Obamacare. There are anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: "Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year..." So the City of Long Beach, in order to save $2 million that it does not have, has reduced the workweek for 1600 people that work for the city down to 27 hours.
Those people, by the way, are included in the "positive" unemployment numbers today. Those 293,000 jobs created and everybody is going, "Yay! Right on, dude!" are made up largely of people like that. Let's see. Even with the unemployment rate at 7.5%, it is way above where the Obama White House predicted it would be if Congress passed the stimulus in 2009. This is important to remember. We passed the Porkulus bill, which is one of the first things Obama did in 2009.
Remember, the knock-off vice president was running around predicting 600,000 and 800,000 new jobs a month? The Obama team said that the unemployment rate would be something like 5% by now if we passed the stimulus. It's at 7.5%. But that's a misleading number, too. I'm not trying to throw cold water on anything. I mean, a lot of people want to look at this and feel good about it, and if you do, fine. I'm just pointing out here that the majority of people that make up this great job report are part-time employees, people that are working under 30 hours a week.
RUSH: A little trivia here, ladies and gentlemen. The current unemployment rate is 7.5%. The current unemployment rate is worse than it ever was under George W. Bush. The worst unemployment number that Bush had was 7.3% in his last month in office, December 2008. Now, you might be saying, "Rush, that can't be, 'cause I remember the media telling us how we were in a recession and how bad the economy was." Well, you remember that right. They did.
For the last three years of the Bush administration's second term, every day the media was pummeling us with the fact that we were in an economic slowdown approaching a recession; things were going horribly. It was all part of setting up the 2008 campaign for the Democrats, whoever the nominee was. But the highest unemployment number for Bush was 7.3%. Today we're at 7.5% and everybody wants to throw a party. For most of Bush's terms, for at least six years...
Well, the unemployment rate probably spiked after 9/11 in 2001, but factor that in, the recovery from that. The Bush unemployment number was 4.7% and 4.8% for a huge number of years. It was hovering around 5%. Statistically, the government has always said that "full" employment is 4.7%. Just by virtue of statistical anomaly, 4.7% unemployment equals full employment, and we were at that number when the media was hyping a recession, and the media was hyping a plummeting economy.
It really was a self-fulfilling prophecy. They just harped on a rotten economy for so long, they eventually made people believe it. I'll never forget, I had a guy call here and he said, "Yeah, I'm doing great, doing great. But I watch the news, and I'm hearing how bad it is, and I'm worried how my neighbors are doing. I'm doing great, Rush." That was the case all over the country. People were doing fine economically, but they were seeing and hearing on the news every day how bad it was.
They felt guilty, and it was all lies.
Now, this unemployment news today, I'll tell you why it's being hailed as fantastic by the media. Because the media is in full-panic mode, and we've documented that all week. The media's in full-panic mode because their hero, "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" gave a disastrous performance in his press conference. His sequester bluff fooled nobody. His creation of part-time jobs and the loss of health insurance by all those people being moved down (involuntary part-timers), and all the people losing their health insurance is being felt.
Benghazi is blowing up. His approval numbers are tanking (at least in Rasmussen) and we've got infanticide in the news. Obama is out now saying he personally... This is the Limbaugh Theorem on this. Obama is saying that he personally has no problem with a 15-year-old girl being able to walk into a drugstore and get a morning-after birth control pill but it's not his decision. (impression) I have no problem with it. I really don't. But I have nothing to do with it." Limbaugh Theorem.
:
RUSH: Everybody is ecstatic with the jobs numbers today. Unemployment down to seven and a half percent, 165,000 new jobs. Well, it's nothing, but in comparison to what it has been --
(interruption)
It doesn't matter, Snerdley. The media's all atwitter about it. That means the low-information voters are gonna hear that. The real number, nine and a half million fewer jobs since Obama was immaculated. That's how many people are not working, that's how many jobs we've lost, nine and a half million in four and a half years. The sequester. The sequester is what I'm crediting it to. (laughing) If they're gonna talk about how great this news is, then I'm gonna credit the sequester for it. He-he-he. Budget cuts, just to tweak 'em, you know, just to tick 'em off, budget cuts led to massive new job gains! That could be our theme here today. Make 'em prove it isn't the case. Budget cuts, government getting smaller. Ahem. We know it didn't, but this is just how we tweak 'em.
Budget cuts. Look what happens when you cut the budget. People start hiring left and right. That's how, if we wanted to play the game the way they do, that's what I could say. I thought about doing that. But the truth of the matter is that, folks, our buddy Jim Pethokoukis over at AEI: "US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama's health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment."
There's no question that the economy is not creating careers. The economy is creating part-time jobs. Now, Pethokoukis says the American economy added -- by the way, I sit here and I go through all this. I'll give you the truth, but the low-information crowd isn't gonna hear this. The low-information crowd is hearing that the economy's going great guns, that unemployment's down to seven and a half percent, all these new jobs are created. And in terms of it being an electoral factor for Obama, it's not. Obama's still got big, big trouble out there, and he knows it. But that's another subject.
Let me stick with this. "While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month," again, these are government numbers, "according to the separate Household Survey, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons," i.e., "involuntary part-time workers..." That's what the Labor Department calls them: Involuntary part-time workers These are people that have their hours reduced. That number of people employed part time for economic reasons "increased by 278,000 to 7.9 million, largely offsetting a decrease in March.
"These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job." At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate -- which is the number people out of work and the number of people who have given up and are no longer counted in the U-3 number -- that number went up. It's 13.9%.
The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want full-time work, went from 13.8 to 13.9%.
And there's more. There was a two-tenths of an hour decline in the length of the average workweek. I mean, this stuff gets detailed and filled with minutia. But the nut of it here is that it's a part-time economy, and the number of involuntary part-time workers is skyrocketing. Now, remember, the economy added 293,000 jobs last month. The number of people employed part time increased by about the same: 278,000. So we're not adding careers, is how I look at it.
We're adding part-time people whose hours are being reduced because of Obamacare. There are anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: "Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year..." So the City of Long Beach, in order to save $2 million that it does not have, has reduced the workweek for 1600 people that work for the city down to 27 hours.
Those people, by the way, are included in the "positive" unemployment numbers today. Those 293,000 jobs created and everybody is going, "Yay! Right on, dude!" are made up largely of people like that. Let's see. Even with the unemployment rate at 7.5%, it is way above where the Obama White House predicted it would be if Congress passed the stimulus in 2009. This is important to remember. We passed the Porkulus bill, which is one of the first things Obama did in 2009.
Remember, the knock-off vice president was running around predicting 600,000 and 800,000 new jobs a month? The Obama team said that the unemployment rate would be something like 5% by now if we passed the stimulus. It's at 7.5%. But that's a misleading number, too. I'm not trying to throw cold water on anything. I mean, a lot of people want to look at this and feel good about it, and if you do, fine. I'm just pointing out here that the majority of people that make up this great job report are part-time employees, people that are working under 30 hours a week.
RUSH: A little trivia here, ladies and gentlemen. The current unemployment rate is 7.5%. The current unemployment rate is worse than it ever was under George W. Bush. The worst unemployment number that Bush had was 7.3% in his last month in office, December 2008. Now, you might be saying, "Rush, that can't be, 'cause I remember the media telling us how we were in a recession and how bad the economy was." Well, you remember that right. They did.
For the last three years of the Bush administration's second term, every day the media was pummeling us with the fact that we were in an economic slowdown approaching a recession; things were going horribly. It was all part of setting up the 2008 campaign for the Democrats, whoever the nominee was. But the highest unemployment number for Bush was 7.3%. Today we're at 7.5% and everybody wants to throw a party. For most of Bush's terms, for at least six years...
Well, the unemployment rate probably spiked after 9/11 in 2001, but factor that in, the recovery from that. The Bush unemployment number was 4.7% and 4.8% for a huge number of years. It was hovering around 5%. Statistically, the government has always said that "full" employment is 4.7%. Just by virtue of statistical anomaly, 4.7% unemployment equals full employment, and we were at that number when the media was hyping a recession, and the media was hyping a plummeting economy.
It really was a self-fulfilling prophecy. They just harped on a rotten economy for so long, they eventually made people believe it. I'll never forget, I had a guy call here and he said, "Yeah, I'm doing great, doing great. But I watch the news, and I'm hearing how bad it is, and I'm worried how my neighbors are doing. I'm doing great, Rush." That was the case all over the country. People were doing fine economically, but they were seeing and hearing on the news every day how bad it was.
They felt guilty, and it was all lies.
Now, this unemployment news today, I'll tell you why it's being hailed as fantastic by the media. Because the media is in full-panic mode, and we've documented that all week. The media's in full-panic mode because their hero, "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" gave a disastrous performance in his press conference. His sequester bluff fooled nobody. His creation of part-time jobs and the loss of health insurance by all those people being moved down (involuntary part-timers), and all the people losing their health insurance is being felt.
Benghazi is blowing up. His approval numbers are tanking (at least in Rasmussen) and we've got infanticide in the news. Obama is out now saying he personally... This is the Limbaugh Theorem on this. Obama is saying that he personally has no problem with a 15-year-old girl being able to walk into a drugstore and get a morning-after birth control pill but it's not his decision. (impression) I have no problem with it. I really don't. But I have nothing to do with it." Limbaugh Theorem.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Welfare benefits for Boston terrorists
If they received $100,000 over the course of 10 years, that only equates to $10,000 a year, actually. Isn't that what normal families on welfare get?
The question is...why do we continue to let people into this country so that they can become a drain on our welfare system???
The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.
“I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick), the committee’s chairman.
Linsky’s committee has requested documents from the DTA, the state’s Medicaid director and Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz. But so far the committee has not released the records publicly, citing a privilege the DTA is asserting under state law.
Transitional assistance officials also told the Herald tonight that the agency was conducting its own investigation into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family ever notified the DTA about his extended trip to Russia, and has since expanded its probe to include a full history of the benefits received by the entire Tsarnaev family.
The question is...why do we continue to let people into this country so that they can become a drain on our welfare system???
The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.
“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.
The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.
“I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick), the committee’s chairman.
Linsky’s committee has requested documents from the DTA, the state’s Medicaid director and Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz. But so far the committee has not released the records publicly, citing a privilege the DTA is asserting under state law.
Transitional assistance officials also told the Herald tonight that the agency was conducting its own investigation into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family ever notified the DTA about his extended trip to Russia, and has since expanded its probe to include a full history of the benefits received by the entire Tsarnaev family.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)