A Bad Idea Is a Bad Idea, No Matter Who Proposes It

Let me state this right up front - Chained CPI is a bad idea. A very bad idea. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains why here:

Even Social Security’s current inflation adjustment understates the true impact of inflation on the elderly. That’s because they spend 20 to 40 percent of their incomes on health care, and health-care costs have been rising faster than inflation. So why adopt a new inflation adjustment that’s even stingier than the current one?

Social Security benefits are already meager for most recipients. The median income of Americans over 65 is less than $20,000 a year. Nearly 70 percent of them depend on Social Security for more than half of this. The average Social Security benefit is less than $15,000 a year.

Dean Baker also explains why here (from The Nation 12/18/2012):

While this is a reasonable way to construct a price index, it may not be reasonable to apply the consumption patterns and the substitution patterns among the population as a whole to the elderly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has constructed an experimental elderly index (CPI-E) which reflects the consumption patterns of people over age 62. This index has shown a rate of inflation that averages 0.2-0.3 percentage points higher than the CPI-W.

The main reason for the higher rate of inflation is that the elderly devote a larger share of their income to health care, which has generally risen more rapidly in price than other items. It is also likely that the elderly are less able to substitute between goods, both due to the nature of the items they consume and their limited mobility, so the substitutions assumed in the chained CPI might be especially inappropriate for the elderly population.

CNN Money seems to be in favor of Chained CPI but they add a significant caveat near the end:

By contrast, other liberal economists do see chained CPI as a more accurate inflation measure but say adjustments should be made to protect the most vulnerable from any hardships caused by the smaller benefit increases under chained CPI.

Obama has indicated he would support such adjustments, although he hasn't specified what they would be.

One option could be a one-time increase to Social Security benefits for seniors once they're in their 80s, said Goldwein, senior policy director at the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Another option: Exempting Supplemental Security Income, which pays benefits to poor seniors and the disabled, from chained CPI.

My bold. Please note: IF YOU HAVE TO MAKE SPECIAL PROVISIONS FOR THE LOWEST INCOMES YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

I say again: IF YOU HAVE TO MAKE SPECIAL PROVISIONS FOR THE LOWEST INCOMES YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities has a list of 10 basic facts about Social Security here. Facts #4, #6, and #7 are especially pertinent (though all are important):

Fact #4: Social Security benefits are modest.

Fact #6: Almost half of the elderly would be poor without Social Security. Social Security lifts 14 million elderly Americans out of poverty.

Fact #7: Most elderly beneficiaries rely on Social Security for the majority of their income.

This is a link to the Social Security Administration's "Monthly Statistical Snapshot" (as of February 2013). As of February 2013, the average Social Security Retirement benefit is $1,264.88. This works out to be $15,221.28 per year. A mythical (non-existent) full-time minimum wage job ($7.25 x 40 hrs per week x 52 weeks) receives $15,080 per year. This is a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago showing how far the minimum wage goes these days. Short answer? Not very far at all. I tried to find the median Social Security benefit but was not able but given that the highest Social Security monthly benefit today is $2,513 for a person who retired at age 66 in 2012. In order to receive the highest monthly benefit, a person has to have earned maximum Social Security wages for their entire work life.

Once again, the people who will least need the use of Social Security are the ones most in favor of the cuts. For those who offer the cliche of "Everyone most have skin in the game" I will reply, "My skin in the game is all the years I have worked and earned Social Security and I will not see it destroyed so the 1% can avoid paying the bill that is now due from their "borrowing" of FICA wages to fund tax breaks.

I have not even mentioned the Veterans who will also be affected by Chained CPI. Their "skin" is the blank check they wrote when they signed their name and swore the oath of enlistment.

And because I can:

The Vortex of Stupidity, also known as Washington, DC

I sometimes think that there has to be a crest to the levels of stoopid coming out of Washington, DC but obviously, I am wrong. Just the past two days, Dean Baker at his blog Beat the Press refuted three different pieces of so-called "conventional wisdom" by different members of the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits, Press, and Politicians in good standing.

First up was his having to counter a column from Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post. Pearlstein says:

Europe is a different story. The bubble years allowed much of Europe to avoid making the kind of structural changes necessary to put its social welfare system on a sustainable fiscal path and reform its labor and product markets. The euro crisis — which is both a banking crisis and a sovereign debt crisis — has forced Europeans to begin addressing those issues.

Baker points out however:

Of course this is completely wrong. The countries with the well developed welfare states, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands are doing fine. The countries that are in crisis, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, have the least developed welfare states among the older EU countries.

Next up we have a WaPo0 opinion piece decrying the "looming short fall in public pensions." Baker points out here:

The pensions are underfunded in part because policymakers would not take seriously those of us who warned that pensions were making overly optimistic assumptions about stock returns before the market crashed. Returns have been well below expectations in the dozen years since the peak of the stock bubble in 2000.

The other reason is that some politicians, like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, think it is really cute to not make the state's required contribution to the pension fund. Not surprisingly, if states get into the habit of not contributing to their pension fund, as has been the case in some states, then pension funds will be underfunded.

However it is more than a bit bizarre that we should therefore ripoff the workers who are counting on these pensions. Suppose state and local governments contract with construction companies for road work or hospitals to treat poor people. If the governments don't put aside the money to pay these contracts would we then think it makes sense to tell the contractors and hospitals to get lost?

Finally, today Baker goes after NPR and Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, who thinks that the biggest problem we face is "the deficit":

Wow, isn't that impressive. So Europe, China and the rest of the world will be really impressed if the United States throws even more people out of work as long as it reduces its budget deficit! That's interesting, had it not been for NPR I never would have known people in the rest of the world thought this way.

As one of the 25 Million plus long term un and underemployed Baker mentions in his post, I would like to quote the inimitable Mr Pierce, "Fck the deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money.

David Dayen at FDL News today (Monday, October 22) covered a survey on the wage gap between federal workers and their private industry counterparts. Not so surprisingly, the public sector workers are paid far less than private sector jobs requiring comparable levels of skills and education:

If you compare organized federal employees, many of whom have college degrees, to unorganized service-sector and retail workers, then yes, you will find higher wages in the public sector. But if you do an apples-to-apples comparison between public employees and their private-sector counterparts in related fields, you will find that the public sector is significantly undervalued.

...snip...

You cannot lump together those who clean up the National Mall and those who work on scientific breakthroughs at the National Institute of Health, compare them to the “average worker,” and come up with a legitimate pay scale for federal employees. You have to go sector by sector and find the appropriate comparison in the private sector. And when you do that work, you see that federal employees are underpaid. This has an impact on millions of hard-working Americans, who are forced to take less than their skills would bring them back in the open market, because of a foolish tendency toward austerity and the demonizing of public workers.

Over these past few years, we've all seen many articles decrying the "generous pensions and salaries" of public sector workers, whether teachers, fire fighters, EMTs, or police at local levels or scientists at the NIH, NASA, JPL, EPA, or any other federal agency you wish to name.

My question is why?

One of the themes to emerge from this year's presidential race has been Mitt Romeny's "infamous" speech at a private fund raiser last May, calling 47% of the US basically moochers and freeloaders because they don't pay federal income taxes or they receive some level of federal benefits be it Social Security, VA or the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) among others.

But why is it so fashionable to trash people who have earned pensions, earned veterans benefits or Social Security or have used the EITC because of low wages? Shouldn't we be asking why there are so many people earning such low wages that they don't even pay a minimum federal income tax? I know for myself, I would dearly love to be earning a salary that would have me paying federal income taxes. Reuters offered this analysis on Friday (October 19):

The number of Americans not owing federal income taxes has been growing since the mid-1980s, and the increase largely stems from expansion of these two tax credits - championed by Republicans from conservative economist Milton Friedman to former President Ronald Reagan.

I want to work in my chosen field, earn a decent wage with benefits and pay my fair share of taxes. Instead, we see the "champions of industry" threatening employees with lay offs should President Obama be re-elected.

Right now, I'm a bit surprised we don't see more news articles like this one from the AP last Sunday (October 14) about a man attempting to rob a bank of $1 so he could be sent to a Federal Prison. How bad must it be to want to rob a bank so that you can get sent to prison. My guess is the three hots and a cot and health care sounded mighty appealing if the option was starving on the street.

And because I can:

Labor Day Weekend, 2012 Economic Report

Well, here we are once again. Labor Day weekend has rolled around; the time when all the politicians extol the virtues of the working man and woman. But as I pointed out last year, once a year praise by Beltway Village Idiots Politicians and Pundits or the local equivalent of same, does not actually make someone a friend of workers.

Just last night, if you were so inclined, you may have listened to Mitt Rmoney talk about workers:

You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you're an American and you don't quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.

Emptywheel does a wonderful job of parsing and eviscerating that paragraph of Rmoney's speech here:

The passage is fundamentally important to the logic of the speech–and indeed, Mitt’s entire campaign–both because it pretends Mitt understands the struggles of average people and because it suggests Obama failed to deliver on Hope and Change.

...snip...

The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples EasyTech Associate is $8.89. The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples Sales Associate is $8.54.

Those jobs Mitt talked about as a symbol of America’s failed promise, the ones that don’t pay a living wage? That’s what Mitt’s campaign boasted about last night as his idea of an “engine of prosperity.”

And it was an engine of prosperity, for Mitt, for Stemberg. Mitt’s worth at least $250 million. Stemberg is reportedly worth $202 million. And they got that money by running an engine of prosperity that relies on workers who are Mitt’s own example of the failure of the American dream. “This just wasn’t right,” Mitt said himself. (Not to mention that some of the steel jobs Mitt destroyed probably were $22.50 an hour jobs, with benefits.)

A bit over a year and a half ago, I wrote this post, Let's Play With Some Numbers, where I put together what a single person with a full time job making minimum wage would have to deal with. And of course, few jobs paying minimum wage are actually remotely close to being 'full-time.'

Today's (Friday, August 31, 2012) NY Times had this article headlined with opening paragraph:

Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds

While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

This particular theme seemed familiar to me, then I realized I had written a post back in April 2011 on the same basic topic, only with a Washington Post article as the starting point. It turns out, the WaPo0 piece was based on a report (pdf) from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and the NYT article is based on an updated report (pdf) from NELP. David Dayen discusses today's NELP report here. Dayen also has this on Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke's speech in Jackson Hole, WY earlier today. Dayen offers this analogy:

Water works well at fighting fires.
Everything is on fire.
We may hook up the hose at some point.
Not promising anything.

As I have written before (here and here though I have touched on it in many more posts), we keep hearing how the Fed is "poised" to act; they just never seem to be willing to take the step of actually doing something. I guess pretending is acting in a way though. Dean Baker talks about the NYT piece here while also touching on Benbernank's speech and the fed.

But hey! Did you see where Honey Boo Boo got higher ratings the other night than the Republican National Convention? We. Are. So. Fecked.

And Because I can:

Sometimes You Just Have to Respond to the Stoopid

Now, some folks may have noticed (ha!) that I have not been posting too much these last few months. Those who actually know me understand that I've had a very good reason for this. However, I have still continued to surf the news sites each day and keep up with various blogs as well. I figure Mr Pierce does such a fine job eviscerating the Zombie-eyed-granny-starver and so many other idiots, that there really isn't much I can say and definitely can't improve on. As well, Dean Baker continues to easily refute the gibberish of so many Beltway Village Idiots Pundits and Politicians, so there's not much need for my rants.

So, I laugh when I see where someone has butt shot himself while thinking of all the "butt calls" I have received from family and friends. And I get a little sad when I see legislators in my home state embarrassing themselves with their diatribes against teaching evolution. (Note: Gravity is still considered a theory as well, maybe some of these folks complaining about teaching evolution "cuz it's only a theory" should maybe be invited to test that gravitational theory from the top of the capital building - rhetorically speaking of course.)

But then, I wind up reading something that is so incredibly stupid and disingenuous, that I am moved to take a whack at it on my own. Today, I reached this point when I read this idiocy from Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post:

Judging by the political reaction, you’d think that Paul Ryan’s budget takes a meat ax to Medicare and threatens economic havoc for the elderly. Just the opposite is true: The Ryan budget spares older people from almost any change or sacrifice — and that’s the problem. We have (and, to be fair, this is mainly the doing of Democrats and their intellectual apologists) made those 65 and over into a politically protected class, of which nothing is expected and everything is given.

It is impossible to have an honest debate about the budget — and government’s size and role — unless this changes, because aiding the elderly is now the main thing the federal government does. If you remove that, fearing a backlash from the 50 million or so Social Security and Medicare recipients, you condemn yourself to bad choices: (a) you can’t deal with deficits, which may crowd out productive investment and risk a financial crisis; (b) you must dramatically squeeze the rest of government, including the social safety net, defense and research; or (c) you must raise taxes sharply, which may further slow the economy.

Now, I am admittedly not an economist (thank doG) but by my rough count those two paragraphs contain maybe two semi-factual statements and about ten misstatements, mis-directs, and outright lies.

My first response after reading Samuelson's gibberish was to rush over to Beat The Press and see if Dean Baker had already taken Samuelson to task. Alas, Dean has been otherwise occupied with taking Casey Mulligan of the NY Times Economix blog and the Washington Post to task for their various misstatements and mis-directs. I imagine he can only deal with just so much stoopid and disingenuousness in one day before reaching his fill.

So if I may quickly:
The Zombie-eyed-granny-starver's budget and Medicare 'Plan' does take a meat ax to Medicare and threatens economic havoc on the elderly (via Kaiser Health News).

Samuelson proclaims that the Ryan budget "...spares older people from almost any change or sacrifice..." (this seems to be an article of perceived Conventional Wisdom among the Villagers and TradMed if this and this are indicators. But the devil as always is in the details as this from Think Progress explains. I would like to add that the attempt at generational war by proclaiming loudly that "55 and above are exempt from the changes" presupposes that those of us older than 55 have no desire to see these programs available to our younger family and friends. Please note, not everyone has an "I've got mine, fuck you!" attitude, m'kay?)

I am going to close this without attacking the rest of Samuelson's gibberish and try to re-store my blood pressure to a more manageable level. But I would like to say that Samuelson continues to act as if the social safety net spending, Social Security, and Medicare have been stand alone problems these last ten years while ignoring the destruction of the US and world economies by the Banksters and fraudsters on Wall St.

[/Harrumph harrumph rant]

And because I can:

Economists try to explain why they were wrong on March jobs forecasts

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Once again, the economic community is scrambling to find the reasons why they were suprised by the March 2012 jobs report. The monthly report from ADP had private sector jobs at 209K increase for March 2012 which apparently led many economists to predict a similar number for the official report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was released on Friday.

Oops. Wrong again.

We have been seeing stories such as this from today's NY Times about the "strong" jobs growth from earlier this year:

Although signs pointed to a strengthening economy earlier this year, the jobs report on Friday came with a message: don’t get ahead of yourself.

The country’s employers added a disappointing 120,000 jobs in March, about half the net gains posted in each of the preceding three months. The unemployment rate, which comes from a separate survey of households rather than employers, slipped to 8.2 percent, from 8.3 percent, as a smaller portion of the population looked for work.

120K jobs is not much more than is necessary to maintain the status quo of population growth (90K is the figure Dean Baker uses) and even 200K, while growing, does not appreciably put a dent in the long term un and underemployment rates. When there are 13M to 14M unemployed and 25M to 30M un and underemployed, 200K jobs is just not going to help all that much.

Surprisingly to me, the Benbernank may have been more realistic than many others (via Bloomberg.) Of course, the article goes on to quote Fed regional presidents as saying that the numbers, no matter how soft, probably won't cause the Fed to actually, you know, do something to ease the un and underemployment problem. No matter that a primary part of the stated Federal Reserve Mission statement is to pursue "maximum" employment.

It does appear that the consensus being reported is to blame the warm weather from January and February for the lighter number for March. Here's Dean Baker's take:

The slower job growth shown in the establishment survey in March likely reflected the fact that good weather pulled forward a lot of hiring so that workers who might typically have been hired in March instead found jobs in January and February. This is most obviously the case in construction, which showed a loss of 7,000 jobs after showing an average gain of 13,000 in the prior three months. Weather may also explain the decline of 14,200 jobs in employment services (the broader temp category) after the sector added an average of 45,600 jobs the prior three months.

The Washington Post presented this perspective this way:

Economists say the mild winter has artificially inflated job growth. February alone stole as many as 72,000 positions from March and future months, according to Macroeconomic Advisers.

Translation: The surge in hiring early in the year may not be as strong as it appeared.

The Post then goes on to "explain" things in an attempt to cushion the problem:

Typically, these bumps in demand are evened out through a process called seasonal adjustment. That allows researchers to compare one month’s economic activity with the next for a more accurate picture of the nation’s health. But this year’s weather was so abnormal that those models fell short, and economists are now scrambling to figure out how much of the growth over the past three months was simply due to a glitch in their systems.

Ah, just a "glitch in the system!" The Post ends their reporting with the rose-colored glasses firmly in place:

Typically, these bumps in demand are evened out through a process called seasonal adjustment. That allows researchers to compare one month’s economic activity with the next for a more accurate picture of the nation’s health. But this year’s weather was so abnormal that those models fell short, and economists are now scrambling to figure out how much of the growth over the past three months was simply due to a glitch in their systems.

...snip...

And despite the hand-wringing over the weather, economists seem to agree that the fundamentals of the recovery are solid. Bob Baur, global chief economist for Principal Global Investors, said he believes that the second half of the year will pick up steam as state and local governments enjoy rebounds in tax revenue and layoffs slow down.

MSNBC is showing the pretty face of the jobs picture in a similar fashion as the Post with it all just being "quirks" in the data.

The NY Times did have a report on what they termed "permabears," i.e., those economists who are skeptical of the strength of the US and global economies.

I'm on an email list from Monster.com and received one a couple of days ago on "Industry News." It included a link to an article on "Five High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs":

1. Optometrist
2. Materials Scientist
3. Economist
4. Aeronautical Engineer
5. User Experience Designer

Since Economists seem to personify the old cliche, "Often wrong but never in doubt" it is no surprise at all that they are both highly paid and low stress. They suffer no repercussions for being wrong. Unlike the 25M to 30M long term un and underemployed who have to listen to their tap dances.

And because I can:

Capitalists: Venture vs. Vulture

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So there I was, surfing around the intertoobz this morning when I came across this headline at CNN:

Stop vilifying venture capitalists

I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback at the headline as it surely did not reflect anything I had read.

In reading the piece, it starts off in a fairly standard fashion:

From 1984 to 1999, Mitt Romney was in charge at Bain Capital, an investment firm that sought out small and sometimes troubled companies that, with careful management and Bain-provided cash, offered the chance for big profits. Bain, like many venture capital firms, invested in startups with the hope that the profits they made on the successes would outweigh the losses they incurred on the failures.

Venture capital markets are simple things. Two groups of people who want to create new businesses come together. Venture capitalists have money but lack ideas. Entrepreneurs have ideas but lack money. When they get together, they trade and new businesses are born.

Then I realized that the author was not really saying much I could disagree with - other than his implication that Bain Co. was this benign entity only helping entrepreneurs to find the needed funding to bring their ideas to market as wiki defines it.

Today's Boston Globe addresses this in this article.

Mitt Romney has long called himself a venture capitalist, experience he says helps him understand the economy better than other candidates for president. But he spent much more of his career in leveraged buyouts than in the investments in start-up companies known as venture capital.

Romney’s one true venture deal was Staples Inc., the office supply superstore, two years after he started Bain Capital. He wasn’t the first to discover Staples; another Boston venture firm introduced him to Staples founder Tom Stemberg. But Romney did lead the deal in 1986 in classic fashion - at first investing $650,000 in the start-up, then becoming its chief cheerleader and assisting with strategy to expand the seller of paperclips and pens.

...snip...

With leveraged buyouts, the investment firm purchases a mature company, partially with its money and with debt it transfers to the company. The new owners then usually streamline the business and seek to resell it.

For example, in the same year that Romney invested in Staples, he led the firm in its $200 million acquisition of Accuride, a wheel rim maker that was part of Firestone. Bain put down only $5 million and borrowed the rest, using junk bonds from Drexel Burnham Lambert. Eighteen months later, Bain resold the company and reaped $121 million in its first taste of the big time in the go-go 1980s.

Soon after, Romney steered Bain Capital more toward debt-driven buyouts. There was more money at stake and less risk for Bain than betting on untested technology.

My bold. And there you have it. While maybe starting life as a "venture capital" firm, Bain Co under Romney quickly turned to being Vulture Capitalists using the leveraged buyout.

At this point, I guess I should queue cue the chorus of voices shouting "FREE MARKET! FREE MARKET!"

Point of fact - there is no such thing. The LBO gets to use the debt interest to write down their taxes. By "streamlining" the business, the methods have often included cutting wages and benefits, selling off assets, and dumping pensions onto the taxpayers through the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. Dean Baker explains it quite nicely here and here. From the first link:

If private equity firms were successful in making companies more efficient and lowering prices to consumers, then it could lead to more jobs in the economy, even if there were fewer workers directly employed in the firms under its control. (This does not really apply in the current economy, where inefficiency means more workers are employed. This is good in the context of a poorly managed macroeconomy with high unemployment.)

However private equity firms do not profit just by making firms more efficient. Private equity also profits by financial engineering. For example, it is standard practice for private equity firms to load their firms with debt. This means that interest payments, which are tax deductible, are substituted for dividend payments, which are not tax deductible.

Private equity companies also often force firms into bankruptcy to offload debt. This can often include pension obligations, which are then taken over by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Insofar as private equity companies are drawing their profit from this sort of financial engineering, it is not providing a benefit to the economy. In fact, it is a direct drain on the productive economy.

So much for the nonexistent "free market." If a firm has to offload their debts and pensions on the taxpayers, there ain't a diddly damn thing free about it.

While I am still trying to figure out how it is possible for the LBO group to incur debt for an entity that they are acquiring (don't you have to actually own something before you can mortgage it?), I'll close this little rant with this article from today's Cincinnati Enquirer headlined "Tax breaks for jobs: Half fall short." A story for another day.

And because I can:

Mr Bernanke, Just What the Hell Are You Waiting For?

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Yesterday (Wednesday July 13), Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke was once again before Congress, testifying on the economy. Buried way down in the Reuters coverage of the hearing was this little nugget:

After recovering from the steepest recession in generations beginning in the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy has lost momentum in recent months. Gross domestic product expanded just 1.9 percent in the first three months of the year, and the second quarter does not look to have been much better.

Bernanke held to the view that recent weakness was due in part to temporary factors like energy costs and the effects on global industry from Japan's earthquake and tsunami.

But he acknowledged the labor market remains weaker than the Fed would like.

The labor market also remains weaker than the 14M unemployed and the 25M - 30M un and underemployed would like as well. While part of the stated Fed mission is "pursuit of maximum employment," the actions of the Fed over these last few years seem to have been more along the lines of "we'll pretend to do something and maybe the miracle will occur." As far as Bernanke's "...view that recent weakness was due in part to temporary factors...," as I've stated before, there are always "temporary factors" that are going to have an effect on life. It is part of life and should be part of his work to be anticipating and dealing with those "temporary factors" as they occur rather than using them as an excuse.

The Beltway Fantasy Land in Operation

It is almost impossible for me to freshly describe the ongoing disconnect between what we see and hear coming out of the mouths of people in and around the Beltway Village and the facts on the ground for the rest of the country. I won't say that they must be on drugs because I've used drugs and I never was as far away from reality as the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits, Politicians, and Courtiers. They just live inside a fantasy bubble. It might be acceptable if the decisions they make each day didn't have such negative consequences for the rest of us.

The Initial Unemployment Claims report for last week came out today (Thursday April 28), and guess what? It surprised the economists. From Reuters:

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits jumped 25,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000, up from a slightly upwardly revised 404,000 the preceding week, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters were expecting claims to slip to 392,000 from the previously reported 403,000.

Of course, usually the surprise is the claims didn't fall as much as expected but today the claims went in the totally opposite direction than the predictions. Yet some of them refuse to give up their pre-conceived notions as AP quotes a Deutsche Bank economist that it is just "technical factors."

Well, those "technical factors" include the US economy growing at 1.8% for the first quarter of the year. From the NY Times:

American economic expansion slowed to a crawl in the first quarter, but economists are hopeful that the setback will be temporary. Total output grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after expanding at a 3.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2010.

When the year began, economists expected a more robust growth rate of about 4 percent, only to be barraged by bad report after bad report. Turmoil in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, which had already been climbing because of increased demand in emerging markets like China. Housing sales dropped sharply. Winter blizzards closed businesses and delayed construction, causing investments in nonresidential structures like office buildings to fall 21.7 percent from the previous quarter. Imports, which are subtracted from gross domestic product, surged. Military spending sank.

There are all sorts of ready-made excuses for the economists as to why the slow growth, however there were two other stories in the news today that tell me far more about where the economy is today than any of the economic predictions.