New Rules Say You Pay Less If You Pay With Cash

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Newark, New Jersey Wants Workers To Bring In Their Own Printer Paper & TP

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The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?

(DAILY FINANCE)   Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

“Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government’s numbers,” says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors’ Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur’s polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department’s jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn’t alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn’t available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market’s problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

“The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren’t going to be thinking as big as they should be,” says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. “It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn’t going to be there.”

Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don’t appear or orders don’t flow in.

College Grads Serving Fries

Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.

Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can’t find a full-time job that they’re qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.

The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves “unemployed” and “looking for a job,” and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica’s respondents.

Jobless Workers Who Disappear

Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who’ve given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.

“Isn’t it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted,” says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. “It’s what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success.”

According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That’s almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.

Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled “U-6,” says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.

Misreading Americans’ Anxiety

However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams’s newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn’t that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.

Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers’ not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn’t extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration’s decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.

By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he’s doing, while 52% disapprove — the first time Obama’s disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.

It’s obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it’s already bigger than Washington thinks.

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Old technology foils Schwarzenegger’s wage order

(AP)   SACRAMENTO, Calif. – As the Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the technology of the future, feared by humans. As governor, he’s being foiled by the technology of the past.

For the second time in two years, Schwarzenegger has ordered most state workers’ pay cut to the federal minimum wage because lawmakers missed their deadline to fix the state’s $19 billion budget deficit. The Legislature’s failure to act has left the state without a spending plan as the new fiscal year begins.

A state appellate court ruled in Schwarzenegger’s favor Friday, but the state controller, who issues state paychecks, says he can’t comply. One reason given by Controller John Chiang, a Democrat elected in 2006: The state’s computer system can’t handle the technological challenge of restating paychecks to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

Chiang cited Friday’s ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeals, which said “unfeasibility” would excuse him from complying with Schwarzenegger’s minimum wage order. He said a fix to the state’s computerized payroll system won’t be ready until October 2012.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 state workers remain in limbo about the size of their July paychecks while Chiang asks the court for guidance on how to proceed. If wages are indeed cut to $7.25 an hour, employees will be reimbursed once a budget is signed.

John Harrigan, who served as a division chief for the state’s payroll services from 1980 to 2006, said upgrading the system would be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. He said it could be done, but not without violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and substantially altering the payroll process.

“It’s not something that you can take lightly and do overnight,” said Harrigan, who also served as chief deputy controller from 2000 to 2002. “You have all the collective bargaining for civil servants and (state universities) that have to be taken into consideration. … It’s very complicated. It would take considerable effort.”

The state’s payroll system was designed more than 60 years ago and was last revamped in 1970, Hallye Jordan, state controller’s office spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

A report by the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office said an overhaul of the state’s computerized payroll system was proposed by the controller’s office in 2004. A year later, the Legislature approved $130 million for the effort, called the 21st Century Project.

Work to complete the project has been postponed by the controller’s office repeatedly over the past several years, said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the governor’s Department of Personnel Administration.

“They had various setbacks that only they can explain,” she said.

Harrigan said he was involved with the 21st Century Project when it was conceived in the late 1990s. He said the state fired the vendor executing the project in 2008 because the company went bankrupt.

As the project dragged on, the state has had fewer experts on hand who could thoroughly understand the programming languages used to design the system.

“There’s been a knowledge loss with people retiring,” Harrigan said.

Even so, he said changing the system to pay state workers the federal minimum wage could be accomplished by the programmers currently on staff.

Implementing the minimum wage change would take six to nine months, in part because the Legislature would have to pass a bill to modify the computer system or collect additional data, said Nick Dedier, former chief information officer for the state Department of Justice.

Asked if the administration agreed that the payroll system could not handle the change, Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear cited the 2009 lower court ruling in the governor’s favor. In part, it said the controller’s office “has not made a sufficient factual showing of impossibility …”

When asked whether it would be technically possible for the controller to follow the order, the state’s chief information officer said it does not have oversight of the system. In an e-mail, spokesman Bill Maile said the office had not assessed the system and is ready to help the controller comply with the order if asked.

The controller’s chief of staff, Collin Wong-Martinusen, said in a letter to the governor’s office Friday that the administration is well aware of the problems with the state’s payroll system because it has been working closely with the controller to modernize it.

“The new payroll system will have the capacity to address the state’s current and future business needs, including the lawful reduction of wages in the absence of a budget,” he wrote. “If you have solutions to the identified challenges, it would be in the State’s best interest that you share them.”

A spokesman for state Sen. Tony Strickland, the Republican nominee for controller who is challenging Chiang this fall, said he was in Portland, Ore., on Friday and unavailable for comment. His campaign manager, Chris Wangsaporn, did not return a call seeking comment.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, who is campaigning on a proposal to make state government more efficient by updating its technology, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. She acknowledges the problem with California’s payroll system in her policy booklet but does not offer a specific solution.

With all the difficulties that would be involved, some technical experts seem perplexed that the governor wants to go through with the order.

“The state isn’t saving any money on paying them minimum wage, because they ultimately have to make them whole,” Harrigan said. “So what’s the point?”

The average state employee makes $65,000 annually, according to the state Department of PersonnelAdministration. A cut to minimum wage would mean state workers would make the equivalent of $15,000 a year.

In its letter to Schwarzenegger, the controller’s office said it would take at least six months to reinstate workers’ full pay once a budget is passed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_california_budget_minimum_wage

Obama pleads for $50 billion in state, local aid

(WASHINGTON POST)   President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

The letter comes as rising concern about the national debt is undermining congressional support for additional spending to bolster the economy. Many economists say more spending could help bring down persistently high unemployment, but with Republicans making an issue of the record deficits run up during the recession, many Democratic lawmakers are eager to turn off the stimulus tap.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

Democrats, particularly in the House, have voted for politically costly initiatives at Obama’s insistence, most notably health-care and climate change legislation. But faced with an electorate widely viewed as angry and hostile to incumbents, many are increasingly reluctant to take politically unpopular positions.

The House last month stripped Obama’s request for $24 billion in state aid from a bill that would extend emergency benefits for jobless workers. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to restore that funding but with debate in that chamber set to resume this week, he acknowledges that he has yet to assemble the votes for final passage. Obama’s request for $23 billion to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers has not won support in either chamber.

Mixed signals

Senior Democratic congressional aides said those initiatives have not gained traction in part because the White House has not made additional spending on the economy a clear priority.

In recent weeks, for instance, the White House has appeared more intent on cutting spending — threatening to veto a defense bill over a jet engine project that the Pentagon views as unnecessary and urging every agency to come up with a list of low-priority programs for elimination. Obama has also proposed a three-year freeze in discretionary spending unrelated to national security, an idea endorsed by leaders of both parties at a meeting at the White House last week, according to Obama’s letter.

With the letter, however, Obama makes a direct and unequivocal case for additional “targeted investments,” including state aid and several less-expensive initiatives aimed at assisting small businesses. He specifically calls for passage of the measure that is before the Senate, which would extend unemployment benefits and offer states additional aid, increasing deficits by nearly $80 billion over the next decade.

Obama asks lawmakers to be patient on the deficit, noting that a special commission is at work on a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan.

“It is essential that we continue to explore additional measures to spur job creation and build momentum toward recovery, even as we establish a path to long-term fiscal discipline,” Obama wrote. “At this critical moment, we cannot afford to slide backwards just as our recovery is taking hold.”

In an interview, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the letter is intended to settle the growing debate over the opposing priorities of job creation and deficit reduction and “where you put your thumb on the scale.”

“While some people say you have to spend and some people say you have to cut, the president wants to talk about both cuts and investing,” Emanuel said.

GOP alternative

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), called the letter full of “contradictions.”

“He’s calling on Congress to pass a [jobless] bill that will add about $80 billion to the deficit, but then calls for fiscal discipline; he says these measures need to be targeted and temporary, but then calls for extending programs passed in the stimulus more than a year ago,” Stewart said in an e-mail.

Republicans have offered an alternative package that proposes to cover the cost of additional jobless benefits — but not aid to state governments — by cutting federal spending elsewhere. In contrast to the Democratic bill, the GOP measure would reduce deficits by nearly $55 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The politics of the Democratic bill before the Senate are further complicated because it has become a grab bag of must-pass provisions. In addition to state aid and more money for jobless benefits, it includes a plan to extend $32 billion in expired tax breaks for individuals and businesses and a separate provision, known as the “doc fix,” that would postpone until 2012 a scheduled pay cut for doctors who see Medicare patients.

When it was first unveiled last month, the total cost of the package approached $200 billion, with only about $50 billion paid for through higher taxes on multinational corporations, hedge fund managers and certain small businesses. Conservative Democrats in the House balked, forcing House leaders to scale back the doc fix and strip out the state aid, as well as $6 billion in health insurance subsidies for jobless workers. In the letter, Obama asks Congress to reconsider that decision. The House narrowly approved the trimmed-down bill.

Now the Senate is struggling to assemble a 60-vote coalition for the measure. Reid moved last week to restore the state aid, but the CBO said the resulting measure would add nearly $80 billion to budget deficits over the next decade. Moderates objected, saying they could not support such a big increase in borrowing at a time when the total national debt has topped $13 trillion, nearly 90 percent of the gross domestic product.

On Saturday, as Obama called for urgent action, senior Senate aides said the scramble for votes would delay final action on the bill for at least another week.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/12/AR2010061204152.html

Oil spill disaster could cost Florida 200,000 jobs

If oil ruins beaches up and down Florida’s coast, it would cost the state nearly 200,000 jobs, according to a new report. With all beaches open, the Sunshine State is a long way from that nightmare scenario.

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Say goodbye to full-time jobs with benefits

(CNNMoney.com) — Jobs may be coming back, but they aren’t the same ones workers were used to.

Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.

In 2005, the government estimated that 31% of U.S. workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.

James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation’s workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today.

“The traditional job is not doomed. But it will increasingly have competition from other models, the most prominent is the independent contractor model,” he said.

Doug Arms, senior vice president of Ajilon, a staffing firm, says about 90% of the positions his company is helping clients fill right now are on a contract basis.

“[Employers] are reluctant to bring on permanent employees too quickly,” he said. “And the available candidate landscape is much different now. They’re a little more aggressive to take any position.”

Cathy, who asked that her last name not be used, lost her job as a recruiter for a financial services firm in February 2009. She started working on a contract basis four months later. She believes that many employers are taking improper advantage of the weak labor market.

“I work in HR, I understand that sometimes you need to hire a contractor because you have a project and you won’t need the person when it’s done in three months,” she said. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”

Cathy said her co-workers who had permanent jobs didn’t treat her differently, but she still felt like a second-class citizen.

“At one job they were giving out H1N1 flu shots but the contract workers weren’t eligible to receive them,” she said. “I said ‘You guys are still in trouble if I get the flu.’”

Much of the change is due to employers’ desire to limit their costs. Stoechmann equates the shift to the one seen in retirement plans, in which employers moved away from the traditional pension plan toward defined contribution plans, which passes more of the burden onto the employee.

Demographic factors are feeding the shift as well. Stoechmann said many younger workers are more open to the idea of not tying themselves to a single employer.

And as baby boomers reach the age when they are eligible for Medicare and not dependent upon their employer for health insurance, many are more open to contract work.

Health care reform legislation passed earlier this year, which will create a mandate for employers to provide health benefits for employees but not contractors, will also feed the trend.

“Once you have an employer mandate in place, you create an incentive for employers to get around that mandate,” said Susan Houseman, a senior economist studying labor issues at the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

Houseman also believes the jobs market could stay tilted in favor of employers for much of the coming decade, because of the depth of job losses and the lingering weakness in the economy.

Sara Horowitz, the founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, an advocacy group for freelancers and independent contractors, said that employment laws and protections have been slow to recognize the shift. For example, independent contractors aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. And they have to pay both the employee and the employer match on their Social Security taxes.

But Horowitz said not everyone who works as a freelancer or independent contractor is unhappy with their situation.

She estimates about 30% are satisfied with the arrangement, about equal to the number who desperately want to find a full-time job with benefits. The other 40% are somewhere in the middle, feeling pleased by aspects of their job and unhappy about others.

“It’s not that most want to be freelancers or don’t want to be freelancers. They’re just following the work, and the work itself is evolving,” she said.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/01/news/economy/contract_jobs/index.htm?hpt=C2

EDUCATE YOURSEFLF: The Economic Hitmen

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FLASHBACK: Soros – China Will Lead New World Order

(PRISON PLANET)   Billionaire globalist George Soros told the Financial Times during an interview that China will supplant the United States as the leader of the new world order and that America should not resist the country’s decline as the dollar weakens, living standards drop, and a new global currency is introduced.

Asked what Obama should discuss when he visits China next month, Soros stated, “This would be the time because I think you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, financial world order,” adding that China was a reluctant member of the IMF who didn’t make enough of a contribution.

“I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in, they have to own it in the same way as the United States owns…the current order,” said Soros, adding that the G20 was a move in this direction.

Soros said that there was a flight from currencies across the board, and that this is why the price of commodities, notably gold and oil, were generally rising. He also stated that an orderly decline of the dollar was “desirable” and that the entire system needed to be reconstituted towards a global currency.

“You need a new currency system and actually the Special Drawing Rights do give you the makings of a system and I think it’s ill-considered on the part of the United States to resist the wider use of Special Drawing Rights, they could be very useful now when you have a global shortfall of demand, you could actually internationally create currency through Special Drawing Rights,” said Soros, explaining that this was already in process after the IMF injected an allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) equivalent to $250 billion into the global economy.

Soros also stated that richer countries were already transferring wealth to poorer countries via SDR’s, with the IMF paying for the half per cent transaction cost.

Soros said the world would have to go through a “painful adjustment” following the decline of the dollar and the introduction of a global currency. Reading between the lines, he essentially threatened to kill the dollar completely if the United States did not get on board with the global currency.

Soros predicted that China would become the new engine of the global economy, replacing the U.S., and that this would slow economic growth and reduce living standards. Soros characterized the United States as a drag on the global economy because of the declining dollar.

Watch the video interview below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOjckJWqb0A&feature=player_embedded

http://prisonplanet.com/

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