EconomyUSA: Jobless increase: Impacts and impasse on job creation in the new healthcare-driven American economy

To contrast with UK's unemployment crisis (mentioned in yesterday's blog-entry), here's a recent stat from USA's labour crisis (May 13, 2k10). Jeffry Bartash wr+ts in MarketWatch, "Weeklu jobless claims little changed at 444,000" --

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The number of people applying for unemployment benefits essentially held steady at 444,000 in the latest week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Claims actually fell by 4,000 for the week ended May 8, but the data was revised up by 4,000 for the prior week. The net effect: no change from last week's headline number. The four-week average of initial claims - a better gauge of employment trends than the volatile weekly number - dropped by 9,000 to 450,500. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch predicted initial claims would dip to a seasonally adjusted 440,000.

Uncannily, the number echoes with biblical sobriety -- "And I heard the number of them which were sealed: [and there were sealed one hundred forty four thousand -- 444,000!--of all the tribes of the chldren of Israel" (Revelation 7:4 KJV; see also Rev. 4:1). Am I the only person who noticed that parallelism?

In any case, the Bible verses are a distraction here. We have to retain our sobriety in order to guage the significance of a half-million unemployed workers applying for jobless benefits, pogey, the Dole over the course of a week, as averaged from a four week's total figure -- must give any considerate observer some considerable pause.

These jobless figures of a week's average nearly rises to a half-million, yet the portion of the economy signified by small businesses, which are the primo job-creators, are being taxed into immobility and somnolescence. Obamanomics is staggering under the new healthcare entitlement (praise God for that were there elsewhere in the Fed budget an adequate compensatory move toward spending cuts and paying down the national debt) -- instead, out of nowhere we have an unstoppable oil disaster we can't afford, and ... and ... we're in trouble in the USA economy. We need a public policy of encouraging and incentivizing the job creators, not big business so much as small.

Britain and America must both prioritize now the creation of jobs for the unemployed, and thus the creation of incomes spendable by wage-earners returned to work -- and taxable by Federal, state and local govts in significant part to pay for the budget-prioritization of healthcare (including the 32 million many of whom will be out of work and jobless). Economically speaking, everything else is secondary. Except of course, intelligent regulation of the financial and the energy sectors. We are not finished with our oil addiction, as President George W. Bush, termed it; rather our continuing and returned workers in many places need to drive their cars to get to work, public transit being unavailable in many places across the continent.

-- EconoMix