Downward Stagnation

In other economic news, retail sails sucked ditchwater in July, according to CNBC, because "the dog ate them":

Five months ago the reason retail sales sucked ditchwater was that the dog had barfed them up.  Times really are tough if "Recovery Summer, The Excuse Comic Dog" is reduced to eating his own months-old vomit.  All of which is to say that Obamedia excuses for their "some kind of a god" one-man economic wrecking ball are as bass-ackwards as Obamanomics.

***Consider the above an, um, appetizer.  Here's the main course:

Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 131,000 in July, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Federal government employment fell, as 143,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment edged up by 71,000.

Both the number of unemployed persons, at 14.6 million, and the unemployment rate, at 9.5%, were unchanged in July. …

In July, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 6.6 million. These individuals made up 44.9 per-
cent of unemployed persons. (See table A-12.)

The civilian labor force participation rate (64.6%) and the employment-population ratio (58.4%) were essentially unchanged in July; however, these measures have declined by 0.6 percentage point and 0.4 point, respectively, since April.

Y'know, I remember vividly the Democrats' mindless clucking about President Bush's "jobless recovery" back in his first term.  Nobody could deny that the post-9/11 recession was over, but they kept gleefully hammering away with the derisive query, "Where are the jobs?"  The answer, of course, was that the 2001 Bush tax cuts were too Keynesian (the $600 rebates) and insufficiently supply-sided (repealing the 1993 Clinton tax hike and its two extra top brackets would have been preferable) to quickly jump-start the economy.  The 2003 round remedied that Lafferian deficiency, and the avalanche of new jobs inevitably ensured.

I think about that time when Red Barry's employment reports come out each month.  Not just because of the anemic numbers reported (a gain of 71,000 REAL jobs in July, a fraction of the number needed just to keep up with population growth), but because of the obligatory-like-clockwork downward revisions of previous months (change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May revised from +433,000 to +432,000, change for June revised from -125,000 to -221,000).  The "official" unemployment rate is still 9.5%, while the REAL (i.e. de-gimmicked) unemployment rate continues to macabrely hover at 11.0%, and the underemployment rate at 16.5%.

This, folks is the "New Normal" dictated by Obamanomics.  Private sector employers - those that are left, that is - don't dare go on a hiring binge with higher taxes on the way and regulatory nightmares like O-Care already in place and various incarnations of cripple & tax lurking in the shadows.  Nor can they even access credit with any ease to finance expansion thanks to FinReg.  They're boxed in, surrounded, cornered, and besieged.  Which is why the only direction unemployment numbers can take is to continue to spiral upwards, and why the White House spins "mere" forelorn stagnation as "the best recovery in a generation":

Here, contra Solis, is a very illustrative picture of just how jobless The One's phony-balony "recovery" really is.

The U.S. economy is like Karen Ann Quinlan.  The family fervently hopes that she'll wake up from her coma and recover, and the "doctors" keep trying to cheer them up by reminding them that she hasn't croaked yet, even as they're secretly plotting to pull the plug.

Any coincidence that another member of the This Old Bulldyke wing of the Obabinet has had a sudden urge to "spend more time with the family"?:

Christina Romer, one of President Barack Obama’s most pivotal economic advisers [heh], is resigning, a change that comes as the White House struggles to show [as in "make up"] signs of clear economic gains to a hurting nation.

She will return to her job as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. The White House cast the decision as an unsurprising one driven by family reasons; in a statement, Obama said Romer has long wanted to return to California, where her son will be starting high school in the fall.

Romer has been one of the administration’s most prominent voices on the economy [I added this link], making frequent appearances on television and at White House events to promote Obama’s policies. Her resignation comes as the White House labors to [bamboozle] the public that the economy is on the right track amid near-double digit unemployment. …

Romer’s resignation came amid a report that she had been frustrasted that she didn’t have as much access to the president as LarrySummers, director of the White House National Economic Council. One administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal relations at the White House, played down that notion, noting that Romer met with the president daily to chart the government’s response to the financial meltdown. The official said Romer and Summers often emerged as strong allies.

Another rat fleeing the sinking Obamadential ship, or "the White House wants to clean house and argue for a fresh start just before the midterms"?  Both, probably, though the utter dearth of fresh "arguments" renders such deck-chair re-shuffling irrelevant.

The house-cleaning, in short, needs to start at the top of the ol' "pay scale", for which the midterms will serve as a massive downpayment.