That's what has been mostly driving down the unemployment rate. In a recent op-ed piece by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO at Gallup, he says the unemployment rate is a big lie. "Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed.
There are those (like Stephen Moore at the Heritage Foundation) who have persistently been saying for years that the U.S. should lower it's corporate tax rate to be more globally "competitive". They have repeatedly said that America has the highest [statutory] corporate tax rate in the entire world — although, in reality, American multi-national corporations usually have a much lower "effective" tax rate, because of all the Congressionally approved "loopholes" in our tax code.
The January ISM Manufacturing Survey shows manufacturing is still expanding, abet at an even slower pace than December. PMI dropped by -1.6 percentage points to 53.5% Everything was down this month, new orders especially declined. While technically not showing a contraction, the ISM overall message tells us American manufacturing is close to running idle.
Friday’s report on our 4th quarter GDP was particularly interesting in that the inflation adjustments for large components of our national output turned negative, which meant that when the inflation adjustment was applied, what appeared to be lower or just modest increases in spending actually represented larger increases in goods and services procured, and hence indicated a larger contribution to our output than the nominal dollar amounts would lead one to believe. The
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