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Jobless Rate Hits Five-Year High |
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More evidence today shows why the economy is the issue in the 2008 elections. The Labor Department announced the nation’s unemployment rate jumped to a five-year high of 6.1 percent in August, up from 5.7 percent in July.
Employers cut 84,000 jobs last month. Combined with revised figures for June and July, the total number of jobs lost in three months comes to 244,000, showing that the spiraling economy is falling heavily on the backs of working people. August is the eighth consecutive month that employers had cut jobs. Some 9.4 million people were jobless in August, compared with 7.1 million last year.
The job losses in August were widespread. Factories cut 61,000 jobs, with housing-related manufacturers and automakers the hardest hit. Construction firms eliminated 8,000 jobs, retailers axed 20,000 slots, professional and business services slashed 53,000 positions and leisure and hospitality got rid of 4,000. Those losses swamped employment gains in the government, education and health.
With the presidential election campaign in full swing, the differences between the two presidential candidates couldn’t be greater. Barack Obama says working families’ current economic hardships were not “inevitable.” They resulted from irresponsible economic policies by the Bush administration that gave tax breaks to the rich while cutting working family priorities. Obama has called for a second round of economic stimulus and for tax cuts for the middle class.
His Republican opponent, John McCain, has said he would continue the Bush policies and that the economy is essentially sound.
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John McCain speaks as if it were impossible to get any of the manufacturing jobs back that have left for Mexico.
His solution is retraining programs and some half baked idea to pay you the difference between your old great union job rate and your new crappy low rate at a dead end job while you transition. Transition to poverty that is.
Regardless of what type of retraining you take up, if you’re over the age of fifty, you’ll have a snow flakes chance in hell to find another decent job in this current economy anywhere!
A woman I spoke with worked at the shuttered Ford assembly plant in Hazelwood, MO as a supervisor for 25 years and made $98,000 a year. Now she works at American Connection Airlines as a ticket agent where she makes $19,000 a year, an $80,000 pay cut! How many people have accepted crappy jobs like this in case after case because it was all they could find before their unemployment ran out?
It’s no wonder this economy is in the toilet. Four more years? NO WAY!