Friday Follies – What Percentage of 12M Will Be Hired?

I'm listnening to the talking heads in the MSM discuss whether wel added 75,000 jobs (the low estimate) or 150,000 jobs (the high, espoused by GS to rally us yesterday) for the month of June and I'm thinking about the 12M people in this country who are officially unemployed and the 25M additional who are unofficialy unemployed or underemployed and I'm wondering how we can celebrate any number that puts us on a path to full employment in about 10 years – providing we don't let any new people in the country or have any babies that add to the current population, of course. 

While yes, 10 years is better than 20 years – we discussed the consumer trends in yesterday's post and there's just no way we can be bullish on the economy with this many people unemployed unless we are adding MILLIONS of jobs each month – not tens of thousands! 

Even if we are adding jobs – the chart on the left clearly indicates that the quality of those jobs has gone way down hill over the past few years.  Even if we had full employment, consumer spending would still be shrinking as wages fail to keep up with inflation.  You KNOW this is true – very few of us are so rich that we don't notice how expensive things have gotten.  What do you think people who live from paycheck to paycheck (most of our fellow Americans) are doing? 

I'll tell you what 46M of them are doing – they are on food stamps!  A new record was hit last month with one in seven Americans requiring food assistance (an no, they are not cheating – a study indicated less than 3% misdirected aid in the program) and the assistance they are being given no longer lasts a month with rising prices and fixed program spending. 

Did I say fixed?   Sorry, my bad – even as we speak, Republicans in the House of Representatives are holding up the Farm bill looking to cut the $100Bn food stamp spending by 1.6% at the same time that record numbers of Americans are in need of assistance.  "Underfunding this critically important program when families temporarily rely on it to put food on the table in a tough economy is irresponsible and inhumane," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a food stamp advocate in the House. …