Weaver95

well, that’s the ‘official’ rate anyways. See here for the details.  As of last friday, we’re also up to 120 banks closed for the year…oddly enough, wall street seems to like the rising unemployment rate - the market response has been largely positive.  Personally - i’m scared shitless.  My own corportation is reporting massive losses in 4th quarter, along with a lot of other people.  I haven’t been hit with layoffs quiet yet, but it might be just a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ we face another round of layoffs.

*sigh*

Ok, so - 10% unemployment.  Not good.  I mean what do you say to something like that?  And if you dig into those numbers, it gets even worse…if you count all the people who got fired and then picked up 2 part time jobs to make ends meet, you find out that we have even more people in a crappy fiscal position than you might have realized.   I suppose that if you wanted someone to blame, you could try and pin this on Obama.  But he’s only been in power for a year, and this fiscal collapse is the result of several long term trends and weaknesses in the market.  He just hasn’t been there long enough to cause this collapse.

That said, Obama is in a position to shorten the duration of our economic woes…which he apparently has no plans to do. Of course, Pelosi is the one largely responsible for that, as we can see here from her ‘mistake’ with funding mechanisms, but Obama could stop her if he pushed.  Ok, supposedly not indexing the ‘tax the rich’ scheme for inflation is a mistake…but the cynical part of my mind thinks Pelosi, Obama and the Democrats are making that ‘mistake’ on purpose so that they can back door a massive tax on the middle class to fund universal health care. It’s sloppy, it’s a dirty trick…and people will fall for it because they’re fucking stupid.  Or they’ll fall for it because they want to ‘tax the rich’ out of some weird sense of ideological vengeance.

I could rant about taxes all day long, but what all of this is leading to is this: we have a LOT of people out of work.  And that number is rising.  It’s rising fast.  What nobody in government is telling the press is that with so many people unemployed (or taking lesser paying jobs to make ends meet), government income from payroll taxes has significantly declined.  The Federal government gets the majority of its daily operating income from those payroll taxes, and with everyone out of a job that’s money they aren’t collecting.

So where is this all gonna end?  I honestly don’t know.  Neither Republican or Democratic parties seem interested in addressing our dire financial situation.  In fact, the Democrats are getting ready to spend a ton of money (that we don’t have) on their health care package.  If Obama pushes through with his legislation, a mandatory cap on industrial production would essentially kill the US domestic economy.  Think about it - how are we supposed to climb out of a downturn when the Federal government is forcing energy use to cost twice more than it does now?  sure, the grass will be greener but when people can’t find work or feed their families then the plan is bad policy.  And forget about the Republicans - they don’t have a plan.  Or what plans they DO have tend to favor letting a corporation loot the public treasury and pillage whatever Obama’s tax collectors left behind.  It’s getting so bad  in D.C. that the Libertarians are looking sane.