Get A Job!? Where Have You Been The Last 4 Years!?

"Get A Job!" says Rep C.W Bill Young (R-FL) to a constituent named Pepe, after he already informed Mr. Young that he does in fact have a job. The buzz about this seems to be how ridiculous Rep Young looks in this case, giving an absurd response to a question having little to do with the question asked. It almost sounds like Rep. Young just blurted out the pre-programmed GOP response to any kind of Occupy-sounding remark. Tea Party favorite Paul Ryan even suggested college graduates should work three jobs just to pay off student loans.

But let us stop for a minute and assume Pepe did in fact NOT have a job. All of this begs the question; could he even get one? According to the most recent BLS  Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, there were 3.4 million job openings on the last business day in April. Sounds pretty good, right?  Well, the problem is he will have to compete with 12.7 million other unemployed persons. That means an average of 3 to 4 people competing for every job! And even if every job were filled, 9.3 million people would still be unemployed. Those chances do not look like promising.
But hey, competing against 2 to 3 other people doesn't sound ALL THAT BAD right? Except Pepe will also be competing with people who already have a job as well. Most notably, he will probably have to compete with internal applicants. Furthermore, many of those jobs require qualifications he probably would not have:

"Gardner Carrick of the Manufacturing Institute says 600,000 jobs are vacant because employers can't find qualified workers"

However, Pepe's greatest challenge could exist if he has been unemployed for more than 6 months. In fact, if he were unemployed, he would have a 4 in 10 chance of being in this situation, opening him up to discrimination in hiring.

Pepe was not in fact unemployed. However, Rep. Young's "Get A Job" comment should come as an insult to all the unemployed in this country who now face appalling odds in their search for a job. "Easier said than done" hardly does justice here. Just how divorced from reality can the leaders of a major political party become? In addition, you just have to admire the hypocrisy here:

Strangely enough Presidential candidate "Flip" Romney seems to be the most consistent Republican about this. I have not found any reference of him telling protesters to "get a job."

The Roundup

Content in Reality: A Scientific Look At The Problem With Third Parties
If we ever hope to establish a clear third party in this country, we need to seriously re-examine our system of voting before throwing our vote away at the expense of the American people.

Updated 7/12/12: Post ObamaCare Ruling Roundup
Some good reads on the recent decision by SCOTUS to uphold almost all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: 

Pundits Urge President Obama To Back President Obama’s Proposals

A number of pundits are turning up the volume on demands that the White House offer a jobs plan based on new infrastructure spending, a long-term deficit plan that includes taxes and entitlement cuts and a market-based health care plan, among other requests. Obama will have a hard time taking their advice, however, given that he’s already proposed those very ideas.(emphasis mine)

Politifact: Former R.I. gubernatorial candidate John Robitaille says unemployment dropped in every state that elected a Republican governor in 2010

John Robitaille’s Tweet that the unemployment rate had dropped in every state that elected a Republican governor is true as far as it goes.

But it is also true that the unemployment rate dropped in seven of the eight states that elected Democratic governors in 2010.

The fact that the unemployment rate dropped less than one-half of a percentage point more, on average, in those states that elected Republican governors hardly seems to support the Examiner headline of: "New Republican governors rapidly bringing down unemployment in their states." Particularly when experts question whether new governors can have any direct impact on an unemployment rate.

Considering the unemployment rate has fallen in 49 states in the last year, that’s stretching the statistic pretty thin. (emphasis mine)

America's wealth gap -- in 1776

"Jeffrey Williamson: In 1774, the top 1 percent of households got 9.3 percent of income.

Compare that to America today, when the top 1 percent is bringing in about 20 percent of income. Nine percent, versus 20 percent. Wow."

David Frum: Success for Some, Stagnation for Most

"Conard spends a lot of effort severing the causes of the crash of 2008 from the apparent expansion of 2003-2007. This seems an untenable project. The real-estate bust of 2008 was rooted in the real-estate bubble of 2003-2007. Yes, the record of the 2000s looks better if you treat the bust as some kind of exogenous event caused by overbearing government. But in that case, you also have to treat the real-estate bubble as an exogenous event. And without that bubble, the economic record of the 2000s is the worst for any period since World War II."

Edward Conrad can't have it both ways.

Paul Krugman: Taxes at the Top

"Tax rates for the super-elite, the top .01%, have fallen in half since Mitt Romney’s father ran for president; or to put it differently, after tax income for this group has doubled due to policy alone. And bear in mind that the US economy flourished just fine under those 60-70 tax rates …"

And national dept as a %GDP went down during this period.

Politifact: Facebook post compares corporate, individual tax burden in 1950, today

The one thing the Facebook claim gets right is that corporations are carrying less of the burden for taxation now compared to 1950. But the difference is not nearly as dramatic as the Facebook post indicates, and its numbers are wide of the mark. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.

House Farm Bill cuts don’t go nearly far enough

“For all of their tea party bluster, the House Republicans have proposed a wasteful, big government program that disrupts the private market, spends billions of taxpayer dollars that we don’t have and harms the environment,” R Street President Eli Lehrer said. “If Republicans are serious about cutting government, they need to start from scratch.”

Shadowy Group Pushing for Tax Chaos in Michigan

On Monday, a mysterious group called Michigan Alliance for Prosperity turned in 613,000 signatures in support of a ballot measure that would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to approve any increase in state taxes.

...

Lenny Goldberg, the head of the nonprofit California Tax Reform Association, was dismayed to hear that Michigan might be following his state's lead. "Two-thirds vote, you've got to be kidding! It's been a disaster for California!" Even loophole-closing and budget-balancing, Goldberg explains, require two-thirds votes in California. Since it only takes a majority vote to add a loophole to the California tax code, once they get in, they never get out—especially because the vast majority of Republican state legislators sign Grover Norquist's pledge to not vote for any tax increase, ever. "It's a recipe for slashing any kind of revenues that you have," Goldberg says."It's a one-way direction for state revenues—and that's down." Even the state's ability to borrow money is affected—since ratings agencies know it will be very hard for California to raise new revenues if it faces a shortfall, it has a lower bond rating than states with comparable debt burdens. (emphasis mine)

The State of Florida is facing its worst TB outbreak in 20 years just as Florida's Tea Party Governor Rick Scott closed the state's best TB hospital. Austerity, ladies and gentlemen!

Recent natural experiments back up a demand-side view of the world.