Land of the Lost (Jobs)

 
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All I can say is this:  wow.

We knew that almost a quarter million layoffs were announced in January. 

And we knew that first time unemployment filings topped 600,000 last week, a level not seen since the Reagan Administration.

But now we also know that the economy lost 598,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6%. The economy hasn’t lost that many jobs in one month since the Nixon Administration, and the unemployment rate hasn’t been this high since the very beginning of the Clinton Administration. Oh, and they revised the December job losses upwards. Adding things up, that’s 2,500,000 jobs lost in the last 5 months. 

Wow.

And things don’t look better when you compare employment to population. Furthermore, the losses were in pretty much every sector.

The job losses obviously have fallout in other parts of the economy, and forming a feedback loop:  people aren’t going to the mall or eating out or even getting expensive coffee; people are cancelling cable and getting their news on the internet; people are going without health insurance, because even the researchers have had to admit that the unemployed can’t afford COBRA; enrollment at community colleges is up; CNN is running articles with titles like 10 meals for $10 each. People don’t have money so they don’t spend money so business dries up so more people lose their jobs so more people don’t have money….

And yet the stimulus package is delayed, and some guys like Grover “drown the government in the bathtub” Norquist have the nerve to blame this mess on the new administration. Yeah, cause Obama totally wrecked the economy in less than 3 weeks.  Way to go.

 
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In Closing: the House passed a bill that would make it easier for innocent Americans to get off the no-fly list; I could add more, but Johnny asked the right questions; Hollywood is officially out of ideas, and is clearly toked up; Economic Illiteracy; Chuck Butcher’s quote of the day, “I can state that nothing is gained by panic, which is simple enough to say, another thing in practice”; Wired notes a Playmate trend; can’t decide if the tea shark is clever or “ew”; best anti-drug ad since “this is your brain on drugs”; didn’t I say Dean should be HHS Secretary ages ago, perhaps even before the inauguration?; and yet one more actor who wants to be Governor.