The Oregon counties the "recovery" forgot

Poverty in Oregon: Interactive maps show food stamps, welfare, Medicaid reliance by county

Nearly five years after the Great Recession officially ended, more than one in five Oregonians continues to rely on food stamps, and nearly 17 percent live in poverty.

Rural Oregon counties continue to fare the worst, with food stamps and Medicaid rates exceeding 30 percent in Jefferson and Josephine counties. In some timber-reliant counties, the poverty rate exceeds 20 percent.

The Oregonian mapped state and county unemployment, poverty, food stamps, welfare and Medicaid rates using January 2014 numbers from the Oregon Department of Human Services. The figures show slight improvements from last summer, when The Oregonian last mapped poverty by county. But it's clear that the state continues to struggle and that rural Oregon continues to be left behind in the recovery. [...]

The article has a link to an Interactive Oregon Poverty map that is quite revealing.
     

Older workers in the workforce

Here are some videos from the PBS website, part of a section called: New Adventures for Older Workers. They show many of the problems older workers face finding employment, and how some of them transcend those problems.

About half of unemployed middle aged and older workers are still unemployed two years later. If you are near retirement and an employer wants to hire you, there’s fixed costs to hiring you. They have to train you. They have to invest in you and if their investment is only going to be spread over a few years then that might not be the best investment for them compared to a worker where that investment might be spread over many more years.

— Julie Zissimopoulos
Economist, University of Southern California

This lady comes out of retirement, and finds work that she's never done before, that transforms her life:



Many older people, well past traditional retirement age, are still working:



More on late-blooming self-starters; "Encore" careers:



The advantages of a geriatric workforce. Here is a company where the median employee age is 74:

I think there’s a kind of sweet spot that’s emerging in life that’s a function of the longevity revolution. So when you’re 50 years old, you have the chance to have a whole new chapter and it’s an extraordinary opportunity for individuals to have another chance to do something important.
— Marc Freedman Founder, Encore.org

It seems that some of the oldest folks, 65 and older, who had to come out of retirement and start working again, have had even more success. It's interesting to see the different approaches that different people of different ages take, and the varying degrees of success they enjoy.
     

I want one of these. Where can I buy one?

Not the Japanese policeman, but the emergency bicycle pedal pump he's using to manually pump gas from an underground tank.

Such a practical and sensible device could also be used, I think, to manually pump water out of my well if our power were out for a long length of time.

I did a google search for "tmc pump pedal", and I found the device here:

Emergency Pump “KP Series”

But alas, you can't buy it from the website, and I can't find an American distributor that carries it.

A search for equivalent devices didn't turn up much: you can buy plans to build your own, or look at student projects, and various other farm-quality devices, that don't seem to be commercially available.

Why are such devices not available in the USA? They could be so useful in so many ways.

Maybe we need an incentive to start making them. Such devices can also be used to generate electricity. So here is an idea.

In the 1930's, they had all those "pick and shovel" programs to make work for people. Obama can't do that now, because heavy machinery have replaced most those pick-and shovel jobs. But we could have a new kind of "job" instead.

Create tons of bicycle pump generators, and then let all the overweight people who sit around collecting welfare, pump water or generate electricity for several hours per day. They could even watch TV while they are doing it. There would be many benefits:

1.) In our nation of obese people, it would be a way to get thinner and stay healthier.

2.) Taxpayer's would actually be getting SOMETHING in return for their money.

3.) It's GREEN energy. Hooray! Placate fanatics AND get people to work!

4.) In an emergency, "pumpers" could be deployed to pump gas, water, and generate electricity to charge batteries as needed.

Isn't that what they call a win/win situation? Or does it just make too much sense? Or is it just Sunday, and I haven't drank enough coffee yet?

     

Which party is better at job growth?

How job growth looked before and after the Democrats took control of Congress

This is why we have 10% unemployment. The Democrats keep blaming George Bush and the Republicans for it, but it's congress that controls economic policy. And since it's the Democrats who've controlled congress since 2007, the unemployment we are seeing today is largely due to their policies and decision-making. The more power they got, the more employment dropped.
     

The "Jobless" Recovery. A Second "Dip"?

Recession May Be Over, but Joblessness Remains

The United States economy has lost more jobs than it has added since the recovery began over a year ago.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The downturn officially ended, and the recovery officially began, in June 2009, according to an announcement Monday by the official arbiter of economic turning points. Since that point, total output — the amount of goods and services produced by the United States — has increased, as have many other measures of economic activity.

[...]

The declaration of the recession’s end confirms what many suspected: The 2007-9 recession was not only the longest post-World War II recession, but also the deepest, in terms of both job losses and at least one measure of output declines.

The announcement also implies that any contraction that might lie ahead would be a separate and distinct recession, and one that the Obama administration could not claim to have inherited. While economists generally say such a double-dip recession seems unlikely, new monthly estimates of gross domestic product, released by two committee members, show that output shrank in May and June, the most recent months for which data are available. Output and other factors would have to shrink for a longer period of time before another contraction might be declared.

Even without a full-blown double dip in the economy, the recovery thus far has been so anemic that the job picture seems likely to stagnate, and perhaps even get worse, in the near future.

Many forecasters estimate that output needs to grow over the long run by about 2.5 percent to keep the unemployment rate, now at 9.6 percent, constant. The economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, and private forecasts indicate growth will not be much better in the third quarter. (The Business Cycle Dating Committee itself does not engage in forecasting.)

“The amount of unemployment we’ve already got and the slowness of recovery lead to predictions that we could have 9-plus percent unemployment even through the next presidential election,” said Robert J. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University and a committee member.

“What’s really unique about this recession is the amount of unemployment in combination with the slowness of the recovery,” he said. “That’s just not happened before. We had a sharp recession followed by a sharp recovery in the 1980s. And in ’91 and ’01 we had slow recoveries, but those recessions were shallow recessions, so the slowness didn’t matter much.” [...]

The rest of the article compares this recession and recovery with ones that have occurred previously, and looks for explanations to account for the differences. Some of their findings are interesting, but the real question they should be asking is: "Why aren't employers hiring?" There ARE reasons. See the links below:

Why the "Recovery" is stalling

What happens when Tax Cuts Expire in 2011?

Obama's Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina
     

A scary unemployment graph. Long term?

Median Duration of Unemployment

This recession looks very different, and much more troubling, than those in the recent past. I wonder how this dramatic change in the nature of unemployment will alter traditional macroeconomic relationships, such as Okun's Law and the Phillips curve. [...]

It's from the blog of a Harvard Economics professor. He goes on to suggest that long term unemployment may not exert as much downward pressure on inflation as people think.


Related Link:

The Great Recession is just the beginning
     

Interactive unemployment map, by county

The Decline: The Geography of a Recession

Follow the link. It's a time-lapse map of the USA by county, from Jan 2007 to Sept 2009. The dark colors represent growing unemployment. It's like watching the lights go out in America.

Here in Oregon, unemployment rises in the private sector, while Government jobs thrive and even increase:

It's no coincidence. Government jobs are union jobs, and their policies are often antagonistic to the private sector; job killers.
     

Unemployment worse during Bill Clinton's term

How bad is current unemployment? It has been worse at other times:

Unemployment Nearly as Bad as During Clinton

When the media aren’t talking about the bailout, they’re talking jobs. They should be. Job losses and unemployment are up. A year into what we just heard is an official recession, unemployment hit 6.7 percent. That’s the highest for the Bush presidency. At this rate, it will soon get as bad as it was in 1993 – when Bill Clinton was president.

Reporters are leaving out that reality of the “staggering” job losses, as CBS called them. Journalists rarely point out that total unemployment isn’t even as high as it was during Clinton’s term (and when they do, the Clinton name is conspicuously absent.) [...]

Read the whole thing for details. Perception trumps reality. MSM bias at work.
     

Who will create more jobs for America?

That would be the candidate who helps those who create the jobs. Duh. And that candidate is John McCain, not Barack Obama. From Nealz Nuze:

OBAMA A JOB KILLING MACHINE

One of the amazing things about this election is that there are so many people out there who are eager to vote for Obama are people who are very concerned about their jobs ... and yet Obama is by far the greater threat to their job security of the two. Just two examples:

1. Obama wants to raise taxes on the very people who we depend on for 70% of existing jobs and 80% of new jobs. Obama hides these tax increases behind his class warfare rhetoric saying that he is only going to raise taxes on people who make over $250,000 a year. The problem here is most of America's small businessmen and women fall smack dab into this territory. They run a small business, they employ several people, and they report all of their business income on their personal tax returns. Just what do you think happens when their taxes go up? Do they take the hit themselves? Not if they can help it, they don't. They look for ways to cut businesses expenses to compensate for the tax increase. Well, guess what? You're a business expense. Good luck with that.

2. Obama wants to eliminate secret ballots in union elections, and he has the full Democrat congress ready to go along. This will mean that the Democrat's precious unions will be able to organize a workplace simply by intimidating a majority of the workers to sign a petition saying they want to unionize? Secret ballot? No way! Now when this so-called "Card Check" bill passes businesses are going to be looking for an escape valve ... a way to avoid having to deal with a union workplace. After all, we see how it worked out for the American auto industry. How do you escape? You pack up and move to a more business-friendly location. Millions of jobs have already fled our shores to escape our punishing tax system. Now will millions more run for the hills to escape forced-unionization? Businesses that can't flee? They'll be looking for ways to increase automation and reduce the number of employees. Count on it.

But that's OK. Obama has the rhetoric. He has the narrative. He has celebrity worship and mass hysteria behind him. It's going to be an interesting four (or two) years.

(bold emphasis mine) If jobs matter, then stop trying to punish, impede and drive away those who would create them.