Stay tuned for the economic news you won't see on the major
media.
History repeating itself? President
Obama has been accused by some economists of making the same mistakes
policymakers in the US made in the Great Depression, which followed the Wall
Street crash of 1929,
This administration has the
smallest percentage of people who have worked in business in the last
generation - Editor
FED GAVE Banks Access to 23.7
TRILLION DOLLARS NOT $700 Billion!
The record 20 million Americans who collected unemployment
insurance benefits last year landed on a safety net that was already deeply
frayed.
A historical compromise has left responsibility for
unemployment benefits largely in the hands of states, and they have
fulfilled this charge with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Half a year later, the direst predictions seem to be
coming true: So far 25 states have borrowed more than $25 billion to keep
benefits flowing after their trust funds ran dry. In many other states the
situation is deteriorating fast.
Our new
unemployment insurance
tracker [2] monitors states’ trust funds using the most up-to-date data
available on the Web – and projects the health of funds six months into the
future. To help readers understand the roots of each state’s fiscal fiasco
or success it also pulls together other helpful information and historical
data that can be downloaded. According to our projections, Arizona,
Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Massachussetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee
and Vermont will find themselves in the red within six months.
And while states’ poor fiscal planning is a serious topic
on its own, our
tracker [2] also follows the increasing human toll: so far businesses in
36 states face tax increases this year, ranging from a few dollars per
worker to more than a thousand. Six states have moved to cut, freeze or
otherwise restrict benefits, a number that is likely to increase. (See
our breakdown of states’ projected increase in taxes [3]—and cuts in
benefits.)
Some states have focused the pain, like Virginia, where
unemployed seniors who also receive Social Security face steep benefit cuts.
Other states, like Pennsylvania, have taken a broader approach: all
unemployment beneficiaries will receive 2.4 percent smaller checks starting
this month.
"Chavez is a good example. Much of the US press
describes him as a dictator. In fact, even our vice-president elect Joe
Biden recently described him in a rally speech as a Venezuelan dictator.
He's clearly not a dictator by any international standard. Even Human Rights
Watch declares it a democracy. The elections are some of the most
transparent and credible elections in the world today."
U.S.
Economy
