The House Agriculture Committee's farm bill would have denied food stamp benefits to as many as 5.1 million Americans, or more than 10 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's enrollment, according to a new analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Q1 2013 real GDP came in at 1.7% Q1 GDP was revised down to 1.1%. Government spending declines were much less of a drag on the economy than Q1 while imports sucked out -1.51 percentage points of economic growth. Exports did recover but were about half of what imports subtracted from GDP. Investment grew on across the board increases. Consumer spending decreased slightly from Q1. Generally speaking 1.7% GDP implies fairly weak economic growth, the third quarter in a row for GDP below 2.0%.
ADP's proprietary private payrolls jobs report shows a gain of 200,000 private sector jobs for July 2013. ADP revised June's job figures up by 10,000 to 198 thousand jobs. Overall, July shows improvements in the ADP job figures. This report does not include government, or public jobs.
Welcome to this week in economic outrage. Every day there are thousands of economic horror stories where one just shakes their head in disbelief at the incessant injustice. To combat the information overload, we give you a financial follies reader's digest and how those in power could care less about any of it.
The May 2013 S&P Case Shiller home price index shows a 12.2% price increase from a year ago for over 20 metropolitan housing markets and a 11.8% change for the top 10 housing markets from May 2012. This is the highest yearly gain since March 2006.
The year 1979 may very well have been the year when the middle-class in America had first began it's long decent into oblivion. According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, manufacturing in the U.S. peaked in 1979 when we had over 19.6 million manufacturing jobs in a labor force of 104.6 million. In 1979 manufacturing was 21.6% of all jobs. Now manufacturing is only 9.9% of jobs in America.
U.S. multinational corporations were actually hiring in 2011 as they were in 2010. Unfortunately as in 2010, they are hiring abroad. In an updated BEA summary on sales, investment and employment by Multinational Corporations for 2011, we have a 0.1% increase in hiring for jobs in the United States while MNCs increased their hiring abroad by 4.4%.
The Q1 2013 Federal Reserve's flow of funds report, released June 6th, shows a select few gained handsomely in wealth and corporate cash is once again at record highs. Household wealth , increased $3 trillion to $70.35 trillion in Q1 2013. This is a 19% annualized increase from Q4, above 2007 levels and a record high.
In a speech last Wednesday President Obama said, "Over the past 40 months, our businesses have created 7.2 million new jobs. This year, we are off to our strongest private-sector job growth since 1999."
But is that really true? And one also has to wonder...just what kind of jobs have those businesses been creating over the past 40 months? It's not always about the quantity, but the quality as well.
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