unemployment

As lawmakers start to shift their attention to job creation, a Brandeis University study finds that four in 10 families don’t have enough savings or assets on hand to pay for essential expenses during a period of unemployment. The report also notes that the poor economy is hitting minority households particularly hard, erasing their economic [...]

The push is on to dilute the climate change bills moving through Congress, and it’s not coming only from conservatives. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports today that 14 Senate Democrats are urging their leadership to amend the proposal to grant more free polluting permits to the coal-burning utilities that emit the most greenhouse gases. In [...]

In Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s statement on  the new unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, he argues that “it is time the Obama administration stop spreading their phony ‘saved or created’ talking points and start creating the dependable jobs America needs”:
President Obama promised jobs during his campaign for president, and the elections in Virginia [...]

More bad economic news from The New York Times:
The United States economy shed 190,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, up from 9.8 percent in September, the Department of Labor said Friday in its monthly economic appraisal.

The New York Times reports that the U.S. economy grew last quarter for the first time in the past year:
Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the three months ending in September, a significant spike from a relatively shrunken base. The economy had contracted at annual rates of 0.7 percent [...]

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announced last month that the recession was “likely over” and that the economy was in the early stages of a recovery. The problem is, many Americans don’t look around and see a recovery.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne today joins the ranks of those predicting that, a year from now, the health care debate will be a distant memory, lost in the raging political scuffle over who’s to blame for rampant unemployment.
While official Washington and much of the media focus on the great health-care struggle, the administration’s economic [...]

A chief criticism of the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, enacted in February, was that too large a portion went to tax cuts in lieu of spending. Critics, including some conservative economists, argued that people would simply save that money, rather than spending it to stimulate the economy.
Showing signs that they can learn from history, [...]

There’s a message emerging from Republicans in Congress that says this: rising unemployment numbers are indication that the Democrats’ strategy for economic recovery has been a sheer failure, and they should be removed from office as a result.
What the critics don’t mention is the inconvenient fact that, at least in the last several decades, job [...]

Unemployment jumped to 9.7 percent in August, though the 216,000 jobs shed were fewer than expected, the Labor Department reported this morning.
It should come as no surprise.
Economists, for many months, have warned that employment rates are among the last economic indicators to rebound from a recession, and there’s no reason to think that this time [...]