Saturday, September 02, 2017
Unemployment Rate Rises By 0.1% In August
The Labor Department has released it unemployment statistics for August. It shows that 156,000 jobs were created in August -- below the figures created in the last two months. The number of unemployed workers rose by 151,000 -- driving the unemployment rate up by 0.1% to 4.4%. This marks the fifth month in a row that the unemployment rate has bounced back and forth between 4.3% and 4.4%. It seems the economy just can't get it any lower.
Here are the relevant statistics for August:
SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORKFORCE:
160,571,000
OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:
7,132,000
OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
4.4%
DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT:
Adult men...............4.1%
Adult women...............4.0%
Teenagers (16-19)...............13.6%
Whites...............3.9%
Blacks...............7.7%
Hispanics...............5.2%
Asians...............4.0%
Less than HS diploma...............6.0%
HS graduate...............5.1%
Some college...............3.8%
Bachelor's degree or more...............2.4%
NUMBER OF MARGINALLY-ATTACHED WORKERS UNEMPLOYED (no longer counted in the official count):
1,548,000
MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS (marginally-attached + official):
8,680,000
MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
5.41%
No Gas Shortage In Texas (Just An Abundance Of Dumb)
A lot of people in the Lone Star State have decided to show their stupidity again, and in doing so have created minor problem with gas availability. They looked at Hurricane Harvey, and assumed their would be a gas shortage -- so they began to hoard the gas.
The truth is that there is no shortage. From WFAA-TV, here what Ryan Sitton of the Texas Railroad Commission (the agency that controls the oil and gas industry) had to say:
As gas prices spike across Texas and fuel runs short at some gas stations, officials say there's no shortage of fuel in the state because of Harvey.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton said consumers are putting undue demand on fuel and that's making it difficult to resupply gas stations in a timely fashion. He called the problem simply one of demand and logistics.
"There's plenty of gasoline," he said. "This will subside."
According to Sitton, the concerns started when refineries began shutting down along the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Harvey. As news spread, so did concern over a potential shortage, leading to large rushes to stations.
Sitton says he understands the worry as people drive up to gas stations and see high prices, long lines and red bags covering gas pumps.
But here's why this is happening, the commissioner says:
• Rumors spread of shortage, spurring rush to gas stations
• Gas stations see higher demand than usual
• Stations run out of gas at a high rate due to demand
• Station owners become concerned about supply, raise prices
• So many stations run out of gas it takes longer to resupply
"Remember the old stories of runs on the bank?" he said in a phone interview broadcast on WFAA's Facebook page. "If everyone goes to the bank at the same time and tries to get their money, then it causes a panic and the bank doesn't have enough cash in the drawer to give everyone their money ... The bank has your money, it's just not sitting at that one [branch]."
ust like the banks, Sitton said there's plenty of supply, but it will take longer to get that gasoline to the stations due to the high demand.
This is what Sitton says about supply:
• The entire world uses 100 million of refined product daily
• The U.S. refines 18 million of those 100 million barrels
• Six million of that 18 million is refined in Texas
• About half of that six million is currently offline or at reduced capacity due to Harvey
"So, yes, that's a lot," Sitton said. "However, we have 230 million barrels of gasoline in storage in the United States right now. So if that three million barrels of refined capacity stayed offline for an entire month that would be 90 million barrels that wouldn't be produced. That would be less than half of what we have in inventory."
And Sitton said that shouldn't even be a concern.
"We don't expect these refineries to be down that long," he said. "We expect that there might be a couple that stay down that long, but some of them, like in Corpus Christi, are already working to go back online."
So what is the bottom line according to Sitton?
"Concerns and even panic over gasoline shortages are leading to a sense that there's a gasoline shortage," he said. "When in fact, there isn't one."
Friday, September 01, 2017
Most Are Convinced Trump Doesn't Like Minorities
The top chart is from a new Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 27th and 29th of a random national sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,278 registered voters), with a 3 point margin of error.
The bottom two charts are from a new Fox News Poll -- done between August 27th and 29th of a random national sample of 1,006 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
The two polls show the same thing -- that Donald Trump doesn't like or respect minority citizens. And they are convinced that Trump's actions against minorities are tearing the country apart.
Trump's base love his perceived racism, but it is turning the rest of the country off. America doesn't want to return to a time when equal rights was just a joke, and they think that's what Trump wants to do.
Public Says No To Trump On Arpaio Pardon & Immigration
Evidently, Donald Trump doesn't care what most Americans think as long as he can keep his rabid group of trumpistas happy. While the trumpistas were happy with his pardon of bigot Joe Arpaio, ab significant majority (60%) of Americans thought it was the wrong thing to do. That's a 26 point gap over those who thought it was right.
And it's not just the pardon where the public disagrees with Trump. They generally disagree with him on immigration. By 19 points, the public says immigrants help this country more than they hurt it. And by a 45 point gap, they would prefer undocumented immigrants be able to apply for legal status than be deported. Americans also support the DACA program (which stops the deportation of undocumented children who've grown up in this country) by a 34 point gap over those who oppose it.
Those are not tiny numbers, and they show that Trump's bigotry against immigrants is not shared by the public.
These charts reflect the results of an NBC News / SurveyMonkey Poll -- done between August 24th and 29th of a random national sample of 10,129 adults, with a margin of error of 1.4 points.
Corporate Tax Cuts Don't Create Jobs Or Increase Wages
Donald Trump is once again trying to pass off the old Republican lie -- that corporate tax cuts will create new jobs and increase worker wages. It's the old "trickle-down" economic theory that has always failed in the past. The truth is:
1. Cutting corporate taxes does not create jobs (which can only be done through an increase in demand for goods/services).
2. Giving the corporations tax cuts does not trickle-down in our economy (but just goes into the pockets of corporate management and stockholders).
David Dayen tells the truth about the proposed corporate tax cuts in this August 24th article from The Nation:
President Trump, after a summer of neglecting his top legislative priority, will make a full-throated pitch for tax reform today in Missouri. The still-fuzzy plan will have a lot of moving parts: lower top marginal rates, simplification of deductions, and elimination of the estate tax, which “only morons pay,” according to Trump’s economic adviser, Gary Cohn. But one centerpiece will be a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate, from the current 35 percent rate to as low as 20 percent.
This is necessary for three reasons, according to Republicans: “Jobs, jobs, jobs,” to quote House Speaker Paul Ryan this June. Though congressional Republicans and the White House rarely see eye-to-eye these days, they are united on the idea that cutting corporate taxes will spur an hiring boom that will reach down to the ordinary worker.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies shows this isn’t true. US companies are already paying minimal amounts in corporate taxes, and the ones most likely under Republican theory to pour tax savings into job creation have instead been more likely to cut their workforce over the past nine years. The data shows that low corporate tax rates more often lead to increases in CEO pay and boosts for shareholders. . . .
Corporations avoid the full rate because of loopholes. There are deductions for domestic manufacturing and “bonus depreciation,” which allows immediate write-offs for half the cost of long-term investments. And corporations benefit tremendously from stashing profits overseas, thereby avoiding taxation entirely. These trillions of dollars in “offshore” profits aren’t sitting in a locker in Zurich; they’re invested in instruments like US Treasury bonds. In other words, the government pays corporations for their own tax avoidance.
The IPS report identifies 92 corporations that reported a profit every year from 2008 to 2015, and that also paid less than 20 percent in corporate income tax. These corporate winners include the usual suspects—banks, defense contractors, telecom firms, and energy companies. Because they were profitable, and paid taxes at or below the Republicans’ optimal rate, they offer an excellent test case. “If claims about the job creation benefits of lower tax rates had any validity,” report author Sarah Anderson writes, “the 92 consistently profitable tax-dodging firms we identified would be among the nation’s strongest job creators.”
But the lower rates didn’t correspond to job creation. Collectively, the 92 profitable corporations cut jobs by 0.74 percent over the period studied, from 2008–16. During that same time, the private sector added jobs at a 6 percent clip. So low-tax corporations did far worse on hiring than their counterparts. . . .
Where did the money go? Into the CEOs’ pockets, for starters. Fox’s Rupert Murdoch’s compensation increased by 74 percent at the same time that he was drastically cutting jobs. CEO compensation at AT&T rose 146 percent. Rex Tillerson, the current secretary of state, enjoyed $27 million as CEO of ExxonMobil in 2016 and a $180 million stock payout for entering government service. By contrast, ExxonMobil, which paid a 13.6 percent US tax rate, got rid of over one-third of its total jobs worldwide. (The company only releases global jobs figures.) Overall, the 92 low-tax firms surveyed raised CEO pay at a faster clip than the US average.
The 10 biggest job cutters in the study also spent an average of $45.5 billion in stock buybacks, more than six times the amount of companies in the S&P 500 over this time frame. With buybacks, corporations use profits to repurchase stock, artificially increasing demand and inflating the market price. This benefits not only shareholders with a short-term price boost but also top executives, who typically have large amounts of their compensation tied up in corporate stock. But the trade-off between buybacks and jobs is pretty clear: Profits used to goose the stock price aren’t put to work to invest in facilities or research, or to raise wages or hiring levels.
IPS’ findings are consistent with academic research on corporate taxes and jobs. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors saw “little evidence that corporate tax cuts boost economic activity, unless implemented during recessions.” The Economic Policy Institute could summon no data showing corporate tax cuts moving the needle; instead, they said, it would “primarily benefit a small number of high-income capital owners.”
The one time in recent history that we gave corporations a big tax cut, the results were disastrous. In 2004, George W. Bush allowed companies with stashed offshore profits to “repatriate” them at 5.75 percent—nearly 1/6th of the normal tax rate—with the belief that the companies would subsequently use the money on business investment. In reality, a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that “a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of almost $1 in payouts to shareholders.” Other independent analyses showed the same thing. Bush reportedly felt betrayed by corporate executives, who promised him they would create jobs with the cash.
Those same CEOs are positively giddy about getting more free money to play with. . . .
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