Let's see: No new jobs, benefit extensions screwed up and Christmas is coming. You'd think the administration and Congress would be doing something about this, but you'd have better luck asking Underdog:
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits held at a 10-month low last week, a sign firings are letting up as the economy recovers.
Initial jobless claims were unchanged at 505,000 in the week ended Nov. 14, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance dropped in the prior week, while those getting extended payments jumped.
The loss of 7.3 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the biggest drop of any postwar economic slump, makes an acceleration in firings less likely as consumers begin to spend. A rebound in hiring may take longer to develop as companies have ample room to boost hours for current employees before taking on additional staff.
“The labor market is improving, but at a glacial pace,” said Tom Porcelli, a senior economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York, who had forecast claims would fall to 503,000. “People are having a hard time finding a job as companies remain wary of the economic recovery. We expect it will be a jobless recovery.”
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance rose last week, snapping two weeks of significant declines, according to a government report issued Thursday.
There were 531,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Oct. 17, up 11,000 from an upwardly revised 520,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in a weekly report. The week included the Columbus Day holiday.
A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected 515,000 new claims.
"[The initial claims figure] is somewhat surprising," wrote Jim Baird analyst at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, in a research note. "Excess slack in the system and employers' hesitance to ramp up hiring appear likely to weigh on the labor markets for some time."
[...] The government said 5,923,000 people filed continuing claims in the week ended Oct. 10, the most recent data available. That was down 98,000 from the preceding week's ongoing claims, and would -- if not revised -- mark the first time since late March that continuing claims were below 6 million.
But the slide in continuing claims may signal that more filers are falling off those rolls and into extended benefits.
Continuing claims reflect people filing each week after their initial claim until the end of their standard benefits, which usually last 26 weeks. The figures do not include those who have moved to state or federal extensions, nor people who have exhausted their benefits.
That's a serious drop from April, which is when this video said we were at a mere five-year high. If you're apartment-hunting, time to renegotiate the rent.
This is right in line with my own economic indicators, which are based on Craigslist. I've noticed that nice apartments that used to go within a day or two now linger for weeks as landlords keep dropping the asking prices. (Also, people are selling fine guitars at deep discounts. Just in case through some miracle, you can actually afford one.)
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. apartment vacancies rose to 7.8 percent in the third quarter, the highest since 1986, as rising unemployment reduced rental demand, Reis Inc. said.
Actual rents paid by tenants, known as effective rents, declined 2.7 percent from a year earlier, the New York-based property research firm said in a report today. Asking rents, or what landlords sought, fell 1.8 percent from a year earlier.
Job losses and falling wages are shrinking the pool of potential tenants. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in August, the highest since 1983, the Labor Department said Oct. 2.
Vacancies “continued to rise despite what has traditionally been a strong leasing period for apartment properties,” Victor Calanog, director of research at Reis, said in a statement. “Given the inherent seasonality of rental and lease-up patterns we expect fourth-quarter figures to be even weaker, implying that we may break historic vacancy levels by year-end 2009.”
The apartment vacancy rate was 7.7 percent in the second quarter and 6.2 percent in 2008’s third quarter, Reis said. Compared with the second quarter, asking rents fell 0.5 percent and effective rents fell 0.3 percent.
You have to give him pundit props: Krugman said from the start (this video is from February) that Obama's stimulus package was too small, and he was right. As expected, the unemployment claims went up to record-breaking levels this week. Via Bloomberg:
The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983, from 9.7 percent in August, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Payrolls fell by 263,000, following a revised 201,000 decline the prior month that was less than previously reported.
As someone who's sent out 250+ resumes in the past year and gotten one face-to-face interview and one phone call in return, I can tell you first-hand it's not looking good on the job front.
Krugman says if we don't do something about this, not only will the human costs will be high but our economic growth will be depressed for a long, long time:
Wait. It gets worse. A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”
The same report, however, suggests that this isn’t inevitable: “We find that a stronger short-term fiscal policy response” — by which they mean a temporary increase in government spending — “is significantly associated with smaller medium-term output losses.”
So we should be doing much more than we are to promote economic recovery, not just because it would reduce our current pain, but also because it would improve our long-run prospects.
But can we afford to do more — to provide more aid to beleaguered state governments and the unemployed, to spend more on infrastructure, to provide tax credits to employers who create jobs? Yes, we can.
The conventional wisdom is that trying to help the economy now produces short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain. But as I’ve just pointed out, from the point of view of the nation as a whole, that’s not at all how it works. The slump is doing long-term damage to our economy and society, and mitigating that slump will lead to a better future.
What is true is that spending more on recovery and reconstruction would worsen the government’s own fiscal position. But even there, conventional wisdom greatly overstates the case. The true fiscal costs of supporting the economy are surprisingly small.
You see, spending money now means a stronger economy, both in the short run and in the long run. And a stronger economy means more revenues, which offset a large fraction of the upfront cost. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the offset falls short of 100 percent, so that fiscal stimulus isn’t a complete free lunch. But it costs far less than you’d think from listening to what passes for informed discussion.
Look, I know more stimulus is a hard sell politically. But it’s urgently needed. The question shouldn’t be whether we can afford to do more to promote recovery. It should be whether we can afford not to. And the answer is no.
Robert Reich agrees, saying this is certainly not the time to worry about the deficit, and predicts if we do, the politics are going to get much uglier:
Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.
Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.
[...] People who now obsess about government debt have it backwards. The problem isn’t the debt. The problem is just the opposite. It’s that at a time like this, when consumers and businesses and exports can’t do it, government has to spend more to get Americans back to work and recharge the economy. Then – after people are working and the economy is growing – we can pay down that debt.
But if government doesn’t spend more right now and get Americans back to work, we could be out of work for years. And the debt will be with us even longer. And politics could get much uglier.
Those of us out here already know how bad it is. When are the economists going to catch up with reality?
Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic.
About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are officially revised early next year, a Labor Department report showed today. The revision would be the biggest since at least 1991.
The bulk of the miss occurred in the calculations for the first quarter of this year, the Labor Department said. The economy shrank at a 6.4 percent annual pace in the first three months of 2009, the worst performance since 1982.
The figures raise the possibility that the government’s calculations continue to miss the mark.
“We are probably still underestimating job losses,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. “There could be another 30,000 to 40,000” that the data isn’t picking up, he said.
That would mean the loss of jobs for September could turn out to be as high as 300,000, rather than the 263,000 reported today by the Labor Department. Today’s report also showed the jobless rate climbed to 9.8 percent last month, a 26-year high.
The potential revision for the year through last March would mean that the economy lost 5.6 million jobs for the period instead of the 4.8 million now on the books.
I'm not as optimistic as this reporter, but then, I don't live on Planet Beltway, either. George Bush's legacy lives on - we still have a commercial real estate crash to get through, and the banks have only postponed their day of reckoning. (Although the Onion has a slightly brighter forecast):
Despite an emerging economic expansion, businesses were sufficiently skittish about the future that the job market continued its long, steep decline in August, according to a new government report Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent, from 9.4 percent, as employers shed jobs for the 20th straight month, the Labor Department said.
The increase was greater than many analysts had forecast, and it undermined hopes that the corporate sector will rapidly rebuild its workforce following the economic trauma of the last year. That in turn could keep a self-sustaining recovery from taking hold, as Americans have less money to spend and less confidence about their own job prospects.
"Our clients tell us they will not hire in anticipation of a recovery, but will wait until they see it," said Jonas Prising, an executive vice president at Manpower, the giant employment services firm. "In a normal recession, people would now start to feel more comfortable and start hiring, but nobody is doing that today. They'll do it when they see real orders and real business."
The new numbers included some silver linings: The 216,000 jobs that employers shed in August was the slowest rate of job loss in a year, which drove the stock market up 1.3 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.
Companies are not laying people off at the same furious pace they were a few months ago -- the number of people to lose their jobs in mass layoffs fell 26 percent in July. But neither are they willing to take the risk of bringing on new workers, despite signs that there could be better times ahead.
Gee, ya think? Everyone I know is depressed - depressed because they don't have a job, depressed because they might lose the one they have, or depressed because they're stuck in a job they hate for the benefits:
WASHINGTON - Workplace suicides surged 28 percent last year, the Labor Department said Thursday, as anxious workers dealt with a struggling economy and watched colleagues depart in a rash of layoffs.
At the same time, the agency’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of workers who died on the job from any cause fell by 10 percent.
The 5,071 workplace fatalities recorded in 2008 was the lowest number since the agency began tracking the data in 1992. That number includes 251 suicides, the highest number since official reporting began.
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Labor officials did not seek to explain the sudden rise in workplace suicides. A BLS spokesman said the agency plans to research it more extensively.
The agency says economic factors could be responsible for the overall decline in fatalities. Workers on average worked 1 percent fewer hours last year and the construction industry — which usually accounts for a major share of accidental workplace deaths — posted even larger declines in employment or hours worked.
Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said the numbers suggest the struggling economy taking a toll on worker morale.
“Those who are at places where there have been substantial layoffs are trying to cope with survivor’s guilt,” Chaison said. “I also think there’s tremendous anxiety in the American workplace. It’s not just being anxious, its being depressed.”
See, Republicans and corporatists will love this - they'll say, "See how much they're producing with fewer people? Obviously, they were slacking off before." Remember, Republicans believe they're entitled to cheap, disposable labor without any pesky legal rights or protections that may get in the way of their profits.
Kind of reminds me of that scene in "Schindler's List," where Ralph Fiennes as the camp commander shoots a very sick man who somehow did the impossible task he was ordered to perform.
"Why did you shoot him? He did what you asked," another guard says.
Fiennes replies, "Why didn't he work that hard for me all the time?"
Yes, welcome to America, where "Work Will Make You Free". (Or is it "You'll Work Almost for Free"?) Hey, at least they don't shoot us - those of us who still have jobs, I mean:
Feel like you’re working a lot harder these days, putting in longer hours for the same pay — or even less? The latest round of government data on worker productivity indicates that you probably are.
The Labor Department said Tuesday that the American work force produced, at an annual rate, 6.4 percent more of the goods they made and services they provided in the second quarter of this year compared to a year ago. At the same time, “unit labor costs” — the amount employers paid for all that extra work — fell by 5.8 percent. The jump in productivity was higher than expected; the cut in labor costs more than double expectations.
That is, despite the deep job cuts of the past year, workers who remain on the payroll are filling in and making up the work that had been done by their departed colleagues. In some cases, that extra work came with a smaller paycheck.
The higher worker output and lower labor costs have been good news for companies struggling through the worst recession since World War II. So far, some 70 percent of companies in the S&P 500 have turned in better-than-expected profits for the latest quarter.
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans receiving claims for unemployment benefits dropped for the first time since January, adding to evidence the job market is starting to thaw.
The number of people collecting unemployment insurance plunged by 148,000 in the week to June 6, the most since November 2001, to 6.69 million, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Initial claims rose by 3,000 to 608,000 in the week ended June 13, in line with forecasts.
The average number of claims over the last four weeks fell to the lowest level in four months, an indication that the U.S. economy is stabilizing after the worst recession in half a century. Even so, companies are likely to be slow to hire new employees, sending unemployment rates higher, analysts said.
“The labor market remains weak but it’s starting to stabilize,” said Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal in New York. “An improvement in employment conditions and improvement in confidence go hand in hand with an improvement in consumer spending.”
Despite what you might be reading about signs of hope, there's no rational basis for believing the unemployment crisis is ending anytime soon. I understand that they're trying to find something positive to say, but many of us prefer to know the truth - like this:
For those receiving unemployment benefits, long-term joblessness has tested the limits of the system. In April, 47.1 percent of all people collecting state unemployment insurance exhausted the usual maximum of 26 weeks of benefits without finding work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the highest rate on record, going back to 1972, when the Labor Department began keeping track.
The $787 billion stimulus package that Congress passed in February contained $27.1 billion to help states extend unemployment benefits. As of mid-May, 2.5 million people were collecting extended benefits. The time limit has been increased to 59 to 79 weeks.
Workers who exhaust their benefits and don't get new training tend to become disconnected from the labor force, said Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz. "A lot of them have ended up on disability rolls," he said. "They're basically never coming back into the workforce."
Extending unemployment benefits and making it easier for the jobless to be retrained could help workers avoid some of the most negative consequences of job loss. But under state regulations, the unemployed often have to give up benefits if they return to school. President Obama earlier this month said he will try to persuade states to allow unemployed workers to keep their benefits as they seek a broader range of schooling.
Until then, Mark Beaupre, 49, of Providence, R.I., is wondering whether he and his family will be able to rejoin the middle class. He lost his $8-an-hour job at a ringmaking factory more than a year ago. It was the last in a string of manufacturing jobs he's held since the 1980s. His wife, Cathy, was let go from her customer service job a year ago. The couple used to earn about $50,000 a year. Now they have fallen behind on their mortgage and applied for food assistance.
"Three cars. College money. We went from that to poverty," Beaupre said. "I never thought I'd be in this sort of situation."
Beaupre has applied for scores of jobs, keeping him out of the pool of "marginally attached workers" who have given up looking and are no longer counted as unemployed by the government's primary measure of joblessness.
But the odds of finding a job have steadily gotten worse. In December 2007, there were about two unemployed workers for every opening, Labor Department data show. As of March, there were five for every opening. Beaupre found that out when he tried to go to a job fair in Providence two weeks ago. Three thousand people turned out.
"I couldn't even get into the parking lot," he said.
Recently, the sight of other middle-class refugees living in a tent city in town unnerved him, reminding him of how quickly his life has changed.
"We were doing okay," he said. "It's shocking. I don't know what to say. We are walking around in dazes."
In the meantime, my friends are telling me their college-aged kids can't find summer jobs. Thanks, BushCo!
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Jose Villareal once had a successful career as a franchising executive with Pepsi Co. Now, at the age of 67, he can't even get a job as a school custodian.
Mr. Villareal is among the growing numbers of retirement-age Americans battered by financial losses who are trying to get back into the work force -- or never left it.
Participation in the labor force by workers over age 65, which has been creeping upward in recent years, hit 16.9% in April, the highest for that month since 1971, the Labor Department said Friday. Meanwhile, unemployment for workers in that age group was up sharply in April from a year earlier, to 5.8% from 3.5%.
"We're just living day-to-day," Mr. Villareal said.
In an April survey, 22% of workers nationwide said they were "not at all confident" that they will have enough savings for a comfortable retirement, surpassing the number who are "very confident" for the first time since the survey began in 1993, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, based in Washington, D.C. A fifth of those workers said they now plan to work into their 70s. One in 10 doesn't plan to ever retire.
Retire? What's that? I'll probably have to keep plugging until the day I keel over.
Mr. Villareal's predicament is increasingly common in this Sunbelt city, where a fifth of the 215,000 residents are 65 or older, compared with one-in-eight nationwide.
Scottsdale's economy has long thrived on retirees, tourists and second-home buyers bringing their wealth to the city. Now, the massive loss of wealth in the U.S. has left the city vulnerable.
[...] The Villareal family's money troubles started earlier this decade, but have been exacerbated by the bad economy.
They lost much of their savings and cashed out their retirement funds in 2000 after a string of pizza restaurants Mr. Villareal opened in Mexico went bust. He then turned to running a small consultancy, but business dried up over the past year as the economy slowed.
Taking a big cut in pay, Mr. Villareal spent several months working in the cafeteria of a local high school, his daughter's alma mater, until a back injury ended that stint. Among other efforts, he applied for a custodian position in the school district, for which he was judged overqualified.
"I don't buy $200 shoes like I used to," said Mr. Villareal, dressed in a white polo shirt bearing a EuroDisney logo, chino shorts, loafers and ankle socks. "I'll wear these clothes for another 11 years -- what do I care?"
Because Mr. Villareal can't get a job, his 62-year-old wife, who had left the work force two decades earlier after the birth of their daughter, started working at a discount retailer where she earns $10 an hour.
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I have to say: While this program sounds good, what jobs, exactly, should we be retraining for? We can't all be nurses, and IT jobs keep getting sent overseas. I've been hearing this for 30 years now, and the right job market continues to be a moving target.
In the meantime, I get turned down for jobs because they think I'm "overqualified" - and I don't even have a college degree! What good will more training do for someone like me?
On Thursday, the Labor Department said weekly new jobless claims fell to 601,000, a 14-week low and much better than the jump to 635,000 that analysts expected.
However, the overall jobs situation remains tough. The 8.9 percent jobless rate is the highest since the fall of 1983; that's when the country was recovering from a severe recession that drove unemployment past 10 percent.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is expected to outline steps Friday to help the unemployed pursue education and training, and keep their unemployment benefits, too.
Currently, people who are out of work and want to go back to school have to give up their monthly unemployment check. And if they decide to return to school, they often don't qualify for federal grants because eligibility is based upon the previous year's income.
The president was announcing the new measures hours after the government releases its April unemployment report. The national unemployment rate stands at a 25-year high of 8.5 percent, and many analysts expect it to climb to 8.9 percent.
Under the measures Mr. Obama was scheduled to outline, according to the White House:
* The Labor Department will encourage states to update rules during economic downturns so that the unemployed can enroll in community colleges and other education or training programs without giving up their benefits. States generally require people who collect unemployment to be actively looking for work, which can make it difficult to sign up for school or job training. Going to school will satisfy the requirement that they be actively seeking new employment.
* The Education Department will encourage colleges to increase financial aid packages for the unemployed. Colleges can consider an unemployed worker's situation and make them eligible for Pell Grants, which help low-income students afford college, and other aid. An unemployed person could get a Pell Grant and use it to pay for education or job training without giving up unemployment benefits. Beginning in July, the maximum Pell Grant will be boosted by $500, to $5,350.
"Our unemployment insurance system should no longer be a safety net, but a stepping-stone to a new future," Mr. Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday. "It should offer folks educational opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have" and give them skills they need to "get ahead when the economy comes back."
Mr. Obama has directed Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to implement the changes. Both departments also have launched a new Web site, http://www.opportunity.gov, to help get the word out to the public.
States also will send letters to every unemployment recipient describing available training opportunities and financial support.
It kills me when I see hopeful headlines like this: 'Jobless claims at lowest level since January'. That's because the vast majority of those in the media class don't understand how the unemployment system works - they've never had an extended experience with it.
When I see a headline like this, I think about a few things the headline writer probably didn't. The first one is, I automatically assume the figure will be revised upward next week, just like it's been every other time it's been unexpectedly low.
The second thing? Having lived through the last eight years of what the corporate media kept insisting was an economic "recovery," I'm familiar with one little sandtrap your chattering classes may have missed: If you didn't work steadily enough - that is, your previous employment or just-terminated employment didn't last long enough to cover the required "base year" fiscal quarters, you're not eligible for unemployment checks, and you probably didn't even bother to file a claim. It's happened to me, and I'm sure it's happening all over the country:
WASHINGTON - The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless aid unexpectedly fell by 34,000 last week, sinking to the lowest level since late January, new Labor Department data showed on Thursday.
At the same time, a four-week average of new claims declined for a fourth straight week.
Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits dropped to a seasonally adjusted 601,000 in the week ended May 2 from a revised 635,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.
Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast 635,000 new claims versus a previously reported count of 631,000 the week before.
Now, let's compare our patchwork system of state unemployment compensation requirements (I think in Texas you can get four weeks) to Europe's:
In Germany, losing his factory job didn't stop Alfred Butt from taking a Mediterranean vacation this winter. Thanks to generous jobless benefits, being out of work "hasn't changed my life that much," Mr. Butt says.
In the U.S., Dylan DeRoberts lost similar work -- but there's no seaside getaway for him. Instead, he's giving up life's little pleasures, like riding his snowmobile, because he lost his insurance, too. "I've learned to live at a new level," Mr. DeRoberts says.
Unemployment is taking a very different human toll on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which helps explain why Europe and the U.S. can't agree on how to attack the global recession. The U.S. is spending hundreds of billions of dollars -- including increased assistance to the unemployed -- to prop up the economy, and wants Europe to follow suit. But most of Western Europe already has a strong, if costly, social safety net, so governments feel less pressure to spend their way out of trouble.
The irony is that for years, Europe tried to rein in its own worker protections -- long considered a drag on growth in good times -- to emulate the faster-growing U.S. economy. Now the U.S. is moving toward a more European system.
The differing U.S. and European approaches toward worker protections can influence recovery prospects. Unemployment is similarly high, above 8% and rising, both in the U.S. and among the 16 European countries that use the euro currency. But Europe's high payroll taxes, along with restrictions on when and how companies can lay off workers, make employers slower to rehire when a recession ends.
That's one reason why economists expect the U.S. to stabilize faster than Europe. Last month the International Monetary Fund predicted that the euro-zone economy will keep shrinking next year, whereas the U.S. should bottom out by then.
Of course, this being the Wall Street Journal, the fact that so many unemployed U.S. citizens are now living in tents is mere collateral damage, and not worthy of comment. The falling salaries on Wall Street, on the other hand, are of grave concern to the people who matter!
For Mr. Butt, losing his job as a raw-materials buyer for a German auto-parts maker was a serious blow. But state benefits will replace the bulk of his salary until May 2010. And he still has full medical insurance under Germany's universal system.
Mr. DeRoberts, who lost his job at a Chrysler assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., near Rockford, last year, saw his medical benefits expire several months later. He says he can't afford to pay the premiums on his own.
"It's scary being without insurance," Mr. DeRoberts says, but adds: "What do I give up? Food?"
Compare and contrast, people. Compare and contrast, and raise hell every time your elected representatives put the needs of corporations above the needs of working people.
It's becoming clear that Republicans are going to make their valiant Last Stand around the Employee Free Choice Act, even though it's becoming clear their talking points fall apart readily and the facts are not on their side.
The biggest indicator: Even though Hilda Solis was nominated to become the new Labor Secretary on Dec. 19, and the thinly veiled obstruction of her confirmation became clear shortly after Obama's inauguration, Republicans continue to block her -- this time raising the phony issue of her husband's back taxes to cause a delay.
Hilda Solis has had experiences that are very different from most of the people with whom she would serve in Barack Obama's cabinet. But her experiences are not so very different from those of working Americans, including the small business owners who struggle to get by on main streets in cities and towns across this country--communities that look and feel a lot more like Irwindale than Washington. That is what makes Hilda Solis such an attractive nominee.
In fact, far from disqualifying Solis, the minor tax troubles related to her husband's small business confirm the congresswoman as a more attractive nominee than most of those advanced by Obama. Those members of the Senate who fail to recognize this fact--and their amen corner in the media--are merely confirming the extent to which they are dramatically disconnected with the experience of working Americans.
Barack Obama made the right pick when he chose Hilda Solis to serve as his secretary of labor. The president should not be dissuaded by the silly spin that would equate the circumstances of a Tom Daschle with those of Hilda Solis. Obama and his allies in the Senate need to inject a measure of perspective--along with realism--into the Washington discourse by demanding that this worthy nominee be confirmed before the week is done.
