Amidst The Deepest Slump Since The Great Depression, Obama Is Touting An “Economic Recovery”
March 29, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 29, 2012
Global Research
By Barry Grey
While the United States remains mired in the deepest slump since the Great Depression, President Barack Obama is touting a modest improvement in employment over the past several months to boost his electoral prospects in November.
The three-month period from December through February has, according to the Labor Department, seen a net gain of 744,000 jobs, the largest for any three-month stretch since 2006. The official jobless rate has fallen from 9.1 percent in September to 8.3 percent in February.
It is necessary to place these gains within the context of the catastrophic collapse in employment that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008, which has left the US economy with 5 million fewer jobs than at the official start of the recession in December 2007. At the height of the crash, US businesses were cutting more than 744,000 jobs every month.
While the US economy added 335,000 net new manufacturing jobs in 2010 and 2011 combined, it lost 1.6 million manufacturing jobs between January 2008 and March 2009, a reduction of 10 percent. The current level of 12 million manufacturing jobs is down 7.5 million from its peak in 1979.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking Monday at a business conference in Washington DC, was notably cautious about the recent upturn in employment figures. He suggested that the improvement in the labor market could not be sustained at the current rate of economic growth.
“A significant portion of the improvement in the labor market has reflected a decline in layoffs rather than an increase in hiring,” he said, adding, “Conditions remain far from normal, as shown, for example, by the high level of long-term unemployment and the fact that jobs and hours remain well below pre-crisis peaks, even without adjusting for growth in the labor force.”
What Obama and his supporters in the trade union apparatus conceal is the basis for the modest growth in jobs in general, and manufacturing jobs in particular. The president hinted at the question when he spoke last month at the Master Lock factory in Milwaukee. “Our job as a nation,” he declared, “is to do everything we can to make the decision to insource more attractive for more companies.”
What Obama has been doing is spearheading an intensified assault on the working class. He has escalated the attack on working class living standards that has been underway for more than three decades, focusing on a drastic and permanent reduction in wages and benefits. There have been several stages in this process.
In the months immediately following the financial meltdown in September 2008, US corporations carried out massive layoffs, using unemployment as a weapon to bludgeon the working class into accepting unprecedented concessions. Big business employed new technology (automation, computerization) as well as speedup to cut costs and rapidly return to record profits on the basis of a smaller work force, despite lagging sales and revenues.
Obama’s forced restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 ushered in a wave of wage- and benefit-cutting throughout the private sector. The bailout of the auto giants was predicated on the agreement of the United Auto Workers union to impose a 50 percent wage cut and the gutting of pensions and benefits for all newly hired workers. This set a new benchmark of $12-$15 an hour for US auto workers, previously among the highest paid manufacturing workers in the world, reducing wages to near-poverty levels.
Click here for the full report.
U.S. Still Down 6 Million Jobs
March 12, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 13, 2012
Real Money
By Sarah Morgan
“Don’t believe the hype that the economy is getting better. It’s not. A lot of people are still out of work.” –KTRN
The stock market has recovered its losses since hitting bottom three years ago today. But despite gains in employment during that same stretch, America is still down six million jobs, data shows.
The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, more than the 204,000 economists expected, the Labor Department reported this morning. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 8.3% from last month. But while the economy has added more than 200,000 jobs for three straight months, the damage to employment done by the Great Recession is still far from repaired.
Between December 2007, when the recession officially started, and February 2010, when the Labor Department’s reports show employment hit bottom, the economy lost more than eight million jobs. Between then and now, we’ve added back more than two million jobs. With that big of a gap yet to fill, it’s extremely unlikely the unemployment rate will fall to a more “normal,” pre-crisis level of 6% by the end of this year, says Robert Johnson, the associate director of economic analysis at Morningstar. A rate below 8% — last seen in January 2009 — is possible by the end of the year, however, Johnson says.
Click here for the full report.
No Jobs For Americans
March 11, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 12, 2012
Institute For Political Economy
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?
No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.
Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.
Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn’t provide an estimate.
Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.
Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.
Of the reported new service jobs, 29% are in health care and social services. The categories that account for the health services jobs are ambulatory health care services and hospitals. Waitresses and bartenders account for 20% of the reported new jobs.
Click here for the full report.
Congress Acts To Extend Payroll Tax Cut And Jobless Aid
February 17, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 17th, 2012
New York Times
By: John H. Cushman Jr. and Robert Pear
With members of both parties expressing distaste at some of the particulars, Congress on Friday voted to extend payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits and sent the legislation to President Obama, ending a contentious political and policy fight.
The vote in the House was 293 to 132 with Democrats, who are in the minority, carrying the proposal over the top with the acquiescence of almost as many Republicans. The Senate followed within minutes and approved the measure on a vote of 60 to 36.
“One hundred sixty million Americans,” said Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who, as chairman of the Finance Committee, led negotiations over the measure with the House. “That’s the number of Americans who are helped by this bill.”
President Obama has said he will sign the bill as soon as Congress passed it, with lawmakers seeking to wrap up the legislation before leaving on the Washington’s Birthday break.
A compromise allowing the extension of the tax holiday for the rest of the year came together quickly this week, as Republicans decided it was not politically viable to resist in an election year. It avoided an abrupt increase in payroll taxes that would have taken effect March 1, returning them to the level of 2010. The taxes are withheld from the paychecks of most wage earners and finance the Social Security system.
The legislation also temporarily avoids cuts in payments to doctors under federal health insurance programs.
In the negotiations, which took place during a two-month temporary extension of a popular tax break that had been in place throughout 2011, Republicans gave up on their demands that the tax cuts be paid for. But they won provisions that would pay for the other spending increases in the bill by making cuts in other federal programs involving health care and government pensions.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the package will increase the budget deficit by $119.5 billion over the next five years, but by a bit less over the longer haul as some of the spending reductions and new revenues are fully realized.
Republicans who said they supported the deal said they had won several important concessions during the talks, like imposing new conditions and limits on unemployment compensation and making a significant cut in the preventive-health spending called for in the health care overhaul that Democrats pushed through Congress in 2010.
Representative Renee Ellmers, Republican of North Carolina, called that cut “the most dramatic blow to Obamacare yet.”
But she said the overall deal was “a very important breakthrough and shows that we can come together and compromise.”
Democrats, some of whom sharply condemned the deal, saw things differently. Even those who voted for the bill, which the White House supported and Democrats considered a major act of economic stimulus to propel the recovery forward, said many of its provisions were misguided.
Two Democratic leaders, Representatives Steny H. Hoyer and Chris Van Hollen, both of whose Maryland districts contain thousands of federal employees, denounced cuts in future pension benefits for government employees, which were used to pay for the extension of unemployment benefits. They would have preferred tax increases on the wealthy, or on corporations, or closing loopholes like the one that lets fund managers treat their income as lightly-taxed “carried interest.”
“Nobody else in this bill, not a millionaire, not a billionaire, not a carried-interest beneficiary, not an oil company, nobody in this bill other than federal employees is asked to pay,” fumed Mr. Hoyer, the Democratic whip, confident that his denunciation of the bill would not endanger its passage.
“It’s time to stop scapegoating federal employees,” Mr. Van Hollen said.
Under the bill, the government would save $15 billion over 10 years by reducing its contribution to federal employee pensions and requiring new workers to contribute more.
But ultimately, the Democrats pronounced themselves satisfied.
“On balance, I come down in favor of supporting what the president asked us to do,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader.
In the Senate, there is considerable support for the bill in both parties, but just enough opposition to stop its passage from being a sure thing until the last moment.
The Congressional Budget Office said the provisions of the bill, taken together, would increase the federal budget deficit by $101 billion this year and by a total of $89 billion from 2012 to 2022. One provision, continuing the payroll tax cut for the next 10 months, will cost $93 billion, the budget office said.
Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the bill “prevents a tax increase for working Americans and makes the most significant reforms to federal unemployment programs since they were created in the 1930s.”
In addition, Mr. Camp said, the bill “ensures that seniors continue to have access to their doctors.”
Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the committee, said the bill “will provide a boost to the economy” and create jobs.
“Unemployment insurance — people spend it,” Mr. Levin said. “That’s good for their subsistence. It’s good for the economy.”
For The Full Report Go To New York Times
8.3% Unemployment Lie
February 6, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 6, 2012
USA Watchdog
By Greg Hunter
“They are lying to you again. Did you really expect anything else?” –KTRN
The most recent unemployment number is a total lie, and that lie was repeated all over the mainstream media (MSM). Two sins were committed here, and I don’t know which one is worse. The report was a sham, and the MSM reported that information without a single question about its accuracy. In a story carried across the MSM spectrum, the Associated Press said, “In a long-awaited surge of hiring, companies added 243,000 jobs in January – across the economy, up and down the pay scale and far more than just about anyone expected. Unemployment fell to 8.3 percent, the lowest in three years.” The report went on to say, “At the same time, the proportion of the population working or looking for work is its lowest in almost three decades. The length and depth of the recession have discouraged millions of people from looking for jobs. The better news of the past couple months has not yet encouraged most of them to start searching again.” (Click here for the complete AP story.)
Here’s a headline for you. If it were not for accounting gimmicks and what the government calls “seasonal-adjustments,” the unemployment rate would have gone up, not down! In his latest report, economist John Williams from Shadowstats.com said, “January’s unadjusted unemployment rate rose to 8.8% . . . The only difference between those numbers and the headline 243,000 January jobs gain and 8.3% unemployment rate, is how the seasonal adjustments were applied. There are serious issues with the current quality of those adjustments, and extremely small distortions in those seasonals can make big differences in the resulting headline data.”
As far as “discouraged” workers who are not looking for a job, that is total rubbish put out by the government. The real story is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) simply has stopped counting more than 1.2 million of the unemployed in its report Friday. Williams goes on to say, “The issues here suggest that the headline 8.3% unemployment for January has moved well outside the realm of common experience and credibility, into the arena of election-year political shenanigans.” Williams is such a gentleman. Please take into consideration the government’s “official” or “headline” number is only based on people being out of work for 6 months or less. If the unemployment rate was calculated the way BLS did it in 1994 and earlier, the unemployment and underemployment would be 22.5% (according to Shadowstats.com.)
A recent report by a D.C. consulting firm estimates about 3 million long-term unemployed have been dropped from the unemployment statistics in the last few years. (Click here for that story.) The Obama Administration has predicted the “official” unemployment rate would be below 8% by the November 2012 election. Heck, if you stop counting enough people, you can get the unemployment rate down below 5%, and that will make the 15 million or so unemployed feel really good. Taxpayers are paying to be essentially hoodwinked by the BLS, and the mainstream media never questions these numbers.
Click here for the full report.
Euro Zone Jobless Hits Highest Level Since Birth Of Euro
January 31, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 1, 2012
Reuters
By Robin Emmott
Euro zone unemployment has risen to its highest level since before the euro was introduced, data showed on Tuesday, a day after EU leaders promised to focus on creating millions of new jobs to try to kickstart Europe’s floundering economy.
Joblessness among the 17 countries sharing the single currency rose to 10.4 percent in December, on a par with an upwardly revised November figure, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat said in its release of seasonally-adjusted data.
It was the highest rate since June 1998, before the euro was introduced in 1999.
“We’re looking at a further increase over the coming months, so that is worrying,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING. “Look at Greece, where unemployment is some 20 percent, and it is 23 percent in Spain. At a certain point this could lead to political unrest.”
After two years of debt crisis and budget austerity, the number of Europeans out of work has risen to 16.5 million people, with another 20,000 people without a job in December from the month before.
At a summit on Monday, Europe’s leaders tried to shift the debate from fighting the debt crisis to reviving growth in a bloc that produces 16 percent of global economic output.
They are looking to deploy up to 82 billion euros of unspent funds from the EU’s 2007-2013 budget in an attempt to boost employment. But most economists expect scant progress while the euro zone’s high debtors are compelled to persist with harsh austerity programs under a new ‘fiscal compact’.
Click here for the full report.
Government ‘Always’ Lies, Tweaks Inflation and Jobless Data
December 9, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
December 9, 2011
Newsmax.com
By Forrest Jones and Kathleen Walter
“It’s not just the government that lies – most people in power lie too like your boss, parents, preachers, lawyers, judges, NASA, and the cops. Wouldn’t it be nice if, for once, they told us the truth?” –KTRN
Unemployment and inflation rates are worse than the numbers that hit the newswires suggest because the government is able to tinker with the methodology to sugarcoat how bad the economy really is, says international investor Jim Rogers.
“The government lies about the numbers that they put out. Don’t take your advice from any government, or you are going to go bankrupt,” Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview when asked if unemployment rates will ever return to pre-recession levels.
The official unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November from 9.0 percent in October not due to strong gains in hiring by due to a shrinking labor force, as would-be job seekers quit looking for permanent work, the government reports.
Even so, the figure is probably much higher, Rogers adds.
Click here for the full report.
Obama Heads Out On Bus Tour To Sell Jobs Plan Amid Anger At Corporate America
October 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
October 17, 2011
Fox News
Against a backdrop of angry protesters and tension in the streets, President Obama is embarking on a three-day bus tour beginning Monday, aiming to tap the anger of Americans dissatisfied with big Wall Street bailouts and a jobless recovery to push Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs plan.
With “Day of Rage” demonstrations over the weekend culminating in sometimes violent protests and dozens of arrests, the president plans to use the trip to North Carolina and Virginia to acknowledge complaints about corporate greed and economic inequality.
In August, the president took a similar bus trip through Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota, where he encouraged supporters to back his calls to pass his American Jobs Act, a nearly $450 billion plan of infrastructure spending, tax incentives and unemployment assistance.
But the prior bus tour unfolded before anger reached the street in the form of demonstrations against corporate America.
Obama has been cautious in offering support for the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which has turned sharply against corporate America, from which members of his own Cabinet came.
On Sunday, Obama used the backdrop of the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial dedication in Washington, D.C., to suggest King would support the protesters, but advise social justice be reached through peaceful protest and mutual respect on the two sides.
“If (King) were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain,” Obama said.
“He would want us to know we can argue fiercely about the proper size and role of government without questioning each other’s love for this country with the knowledge that in this democracy, government is no distant object but is, rather, an expression of our common commitments to one another,” he continued.
The president’s solution to the disgruntled masses is his second stimulus plan, which the White House says independent forecasters project will create up to 1.9 million jobs and grow the economy.
“The president will challenge Congress to get to work this week, passing every element of the American Jobs Act piece by piece — starting with the proposal to prevent teacher layoffs, keep police officers on the beat and keep firefighters on the job,” a White House aide said in advance of the trip Sunday.
But with 9.1 percent unemployment the outcome of the president’s prior stimulus plan, and North Carolina in particular facing an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent, the president will try to shore up support in a red state that he was able to win in 2008, but where he now sees his support eroding among independents.
Republicans are providing their own alternative to the jobs plan, and say they will agree to chop up the president’s proposals into digestible pieces, but only vote on some of his ideas.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Sunday that Republicans agree that some infrastructure projects are necessary, but regulatory red tape makes it possible for only pet projects to get funding. Cantor added that stimulus money used to pay salaries does nothing to prolong economic growth.
“We saw what happened with the stimulus money. Much of that went to the states. And you know what happened? It sustained some jobs for about a year and then the states were faced about with billions of dollars in debt once that year was over it,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
White House officials say they can live with passing the plan in multiple pieces as long as it all passes.
On his latest tour, the president is going to smaller communities, including those where he did not fare well in 2008, in an attempt to spend time in areas not easily accessible to large airports.
While in Asheville, the president will sell his plan by using a local example, the proposed renovation of the regional airport’s sole runway. That is one project among many that could be addressed if the president’s proposed $50 billion set aside for infrastructure spending were approved, the White House says. The president also plans to propose more spending — including $900 million for North Carolina — to keep or hire teachers.
The White House says as many as 280,000 teacher jobs across the nation could be at risk the coming year. A provision in the American Jobs Act would prevent this from happening and allow states to hire back more teachers.
Obama will also discuss the importance of keeping cops and firefighters on the job, and he is expected to propose tax incentives for small businesses to hire veterans, an idea that is supported by Republicans.
On Monday, Andy Card, former George W. Bush White House chief of staff, called Obama’s trip a “misery tour.”
“He’s a very intelligent man, but that doesn’t mean he has dealt with the world as it is. And he hasn’t been able to make government work. He hasn’t provided the real leadership that the president has to provide,” Card said.
Obama’s trip to North Carolina and Virginia is strategic in that both are politically important swing states that will have a say in the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. But the White House insists the trip is not political. In fact, the president has no fundraising events scheduled and the Democratic National Committee is not paying for any portion of the trip.
Click here for the full report from Fox News
Is the Welfare System Making Americans Incompetent?
August 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
August 23rd, 2011
The Huffington Post
By: Janell Ross
Sasha Mandel says she never imagined going on welfare. But her plans for a career and the independence she craved ran headlong into a pair of unforeseen developments — an unplanned pregnancy at 18, and the worst job market since the Great Depression.
In April 2009, freshly unemployed and devoid of savings, Mandel reluctantly walked into a state office in Phoenix to apply for welfare. Her caseworker was sympathetic, swiftly arranging emergency food aid along with cash assistance. But she was also clear on the limits of that relief: Under the terms of Arizona’s welfare program, Mandel could draw a welfare check for no more than three years.
That timeframe was about to get shorter. This April, cash-strapped Arizona tightened the limit on welfare payments to two years. Mandel learned about the change when she received a letter from the state in June. She was only a few weeks away from exhausting her benefits.
“That letter,” she said, “it just said to me that they decided to change the rules when the game for single mothers is already really, really hard.”
Fifteen years after President Clinton joined with congressional Republicans and affixed his signature to a law that “ended welfare as we know it” — imposing a five-year time limit on federal cash assistance for poor families, while allowing states to set shorter limits — the social safety net is failing to keep pace with the needs of struggling Americans, many experts say. Millions of single mothers are falling through the cracks, scrambling to support their families with neither paychecks nor government aid.
Welfare reform, one of the hallmark events of the Clinton presidency, was supposed to be a healthy tradeoff: Single mothers who had grown dependent on government checks would instead go out and work. The federal government gave the states lump sums of money, known as block grants, to create programs that would prepare, prompt and push poor single mothers accustomed to living on welfare into the workforce, providing job training, resume-writing tutorials and subsidized child care.
But the time limits on cash aid were enacted in the mid-1990s, in the midst of one of the most vibrant job markets in modern times. Today, with nearly 14 million people officially out of work and jobseekers outnumbering available positions by more than four-to-one, the logic of those reforms is being overwhelmed by the reality of a stark shortage of paychecks, experts say.
“Today, everybody is expected to work,” said Sheila Zedlewski, an economist at the Urban Institute and co-author of an institute study released last week that examines the consequences of welfare reform during the recession. “The problem is finding a job is incredibly hard.”
Since the beginning of the recession in late 2007, the nation’s unemployment rate has increased by 88 percent, while welfare caseloads have grown just 14 percent, according to the Urban Institute report.
Experts say this disparity reflects the inadequacy of remaining welfare programs in the face of a veritable epidemic of joblessness. During a period of national distress, fewer and fewer people have been able to secure help to meet their basic needs, according to the report.
Between 2007 and 2010 — just as the economy was contracting and joblessness was rising, generating greater demand for public assistance — welfare caseloads dropped in 13 states, according to the Urban Institute report. In Arizona, which faced a particularly powerful blow to its finances in the form of a sustained plunge in housing prices, the welfare caseload dropped by 48 percent during that timeframe.
Many of those who advocated for ending welfare as an unlimited entitlement say the change has been beneficial — the share of single, never married mothers in the workforce climbed from 62.9 percent in 1996 to 72.4 percent a decade later, according to federal data.
“Poverty rates are still lower and work rates still higher than before welfare reform,” said Ron Haskins, who played a key role in shaping the policy as a senior Republican congressional adviser, and who is now co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. “In that sense, welfare reform has been a success.”
But as Haskins acknowledges, the reforms have never managed to address the barriers confronting a small subset of welfare recipients with very limited education, significant physical and mental health problems, or unhealthy children, preventing them from entering the workforce.
The share of people who both live in poverty with no reported income and lack welfare assistance has changed significantly since welfare reform. In 1996, 1 in 8 single mothers fit this profile, according to Zedlewski. By 2008, the most recent year for which this data is available, that figure had climbed to 1 in 5, she said.
In the early days after welfare reform, many states enacted stricter time limits, Arizona included, and beefed up programs offering subsidized child care — a crucial component for single mothers required to work. The budget crisis assailing states has prompted many states to effectively roll back these programs.
States around the country are slashing cash benefits, reducing time limits and, in some cases, imposing strict work requirements on welfare applicants, said LaDonna Pavetti, an expert on welfare who works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The practices also make it very hard for parents already dealing with a job crisis, a disability or other complications to qualify for cash aid, she said.
In the 2000s, states also began shifting federal funds that could be used for cash benefits for single mothers to cover other costs. Some of the money went to cover the cost of child care or transportation assistance. But large shares were also used to fund state child welfare agencies, which frequently don’t get all the resources they need from states.
In 1997, the first year the reforms took effect in most states, Georgia used 73 percent of its federal welfare block grant to provide cash aid to poor families, according to data the state reported to the federal government. By 2009, the most recent year for which complete data is available, Georgia spent just 11 percent of its block grant on cash aid. Spending in Florida, Texas and Arizona plunged by similar margins.
The impact of these cuts is easy to discern: Far fewer poor families are being given cash assistance. In 2009, Georgia and Texas each provided cash aid to less than 10 percent of poor families, according to the Urban Institute report.
“You have so many people who were pushed off welfare who didn’t find work in the beginning, and today there are so many people who can’t get welfare at all,” said Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who resigned from a senior position in the Clinton administration to protest the President’s decision to sign welfare reform into law. “As an anti-recessionary tool, welfare as we know it today is useless.”
Edelman compares the paltry expansion of the nation’s welfare rolls during the recession — from about 3.9 million families in 2007 to about 4.4 million families in 2010 — to what happened to the food stamp program. During the same time period, food stamp program participation rose from about 30 million households to 44 million, reflecting real levels of economic need.
“What we’ve done is make things worse,” Edelman said. “There are now people who cannot find work, and who can not get welfare.”
Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post
Government Claims 1 in 5 Americans Are Mentally Ill
November 19, 2010 by admin
Filed under News Stories
November 19th, 2010
CNBC.com
More than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness last year, and 11 million had a serious illness, U.S. government researchers reported on Thursday.
Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest level of mental illness at 30 percent, while those aged 50 and older had the lowest, with 13.7 percent, said the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA.
The rate, slightly higher than last year’s 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes of Health, said.
“Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed,” Pamela Hyde, SAMHSA’s administrator, said in a statement.
“The consequences for individuals, families and communities can be devastating. If left untreated mental illnesses can result in disability, substance abuse, suicides, lost productivity, and family discord.”
The 2009 mental health survey hints at the impact of record unemployment rates, which last year hit a 25-year high as struggling employers slashed jobs to cope with a weak economy.
For many, lost employment meant loss of health insurance, leaving many of the nation’s mentally ill unable to get treatment.
According to the survey, 6.1 million adults last year had a mental health need that went untreated, and 42.5 percent said it was because they could not afford it.
It found 14.8 million Americans had major depression last year, and 10 percent of the jobless did, compared with 7.5 of retired people or those not in the job force, 7.3 percent who worked part time and 5.4 percent who worked full time.
Only 64 percent of adults aged 18 or older with major depression were treated last year, compared with 71 percent a year ago.
Being jobless also increased the risk of suicide.
Adults who were unemployed last year were twice as likely to have serious thoughts of suicide as people who were fully employed, with 6.6 percent of the unemployed considering suicide, compared with 3.1 percent of those who were working.
The survey also found that 23.8 percent of women had some form of mental illness, compared with 15.6 percent of men.
