Help The Middle ClassNews and Information For The Heart Of America
Senate Passes $140 Billion Bill Extending Jobless Claims (CNN)
The Senate on Wednesday approved a wide-ranging bill that would push back the deadline to file for extended unemployment insurance until year-end and extends dozens of expired tax breaks.
The bill, passed by a 62-36 vote, is the latest job creation effort to go before lawmakers, though it contains virtually no new initiatives to boost employment. [...]
FACT CHECKING THE STIMULUS ACT: JOBLESS RATE HIGH, GROWTH SLOW (AP/YAHOO!)
Did the stimulus work or not? A year after Congress passed President Barack Obama’s huge economic revival plan, the results are mixed — and hardly final.
Despite Obama’s bold promises, unemployment remains stubbornly high. But job losses have slowed dramatically.
And the nation’s recent economic growth is real, even though the government has spent just one-third of [...]
Obama Declares Stimulus A Success (Yahoo!/AP)
President Barack Obama hailed Wednesday’s one-year-old economic stimulus law as an accomplishment that staved off another Great Depression and kept up to 2 million people on the job.
Still, with millions still out of work and losing patience, Obama acknowledged that to them, “It doesn’t yet feel like much of a recovery.”
Marking the anniversary of the [...]
New Wave Of Foreclosures By The End of 2010 is Predicted (Los Angeles Times)
About 4 million U.S. homeowners are 90 days or more delinquent on their loans or in foreclosure proceedings, Moody’s Economy.com says. A federal loan modification program is helping a relative few.
Reporting from Washington – [...]
JOBS UPDATE: Temp Jobs No Longer Lead To Permanent Hirings (Yahoo!/AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not the signal it used to be.
When employers hire temporary staff after a recession, it’s long been seen as a sign they’ll soon hire permanent workers.
Not these days.
Companies have hired more temps for four straight months. Yet they remain reluctant to make permanent hires because of doubts about the recovery’s durability.
Even [...]
House Allows Debt to Rise $1.9 Trillion (New York Times)
The House voted Thursday to allow the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper in debt, an increase of about $6,000 for every United States resident.
The accumulated debt already amounts to roughly $40,000 per person.
The debt increase, approved 217 to 212, is only enough to keep the government afloat for about another year as it borrows [...]
When Obama Talks, The Markets Tank (AP/Yahoo! News)
It was the fat cats’ fault before. But now it’s becoming Obama’s.
With the unemployment rate stubbornly high, people were already shifting blame for their economic woes to President Barack Obama one year into his presidency. Last week, investors joined them.
For 10 months, the stock market climbed at breathtaking speed. But the Dow Jones industrial average [...]
White House Officials Contradict Themselves On Success of Stimulus (Politico)
White House advisers appearing on the Sunday talk shows gave three different estimates of how many jobs could be credited to President Obama’s Recovery Act.
The discrepancy was pointed out by a Republican official in an email to reporters noting that “Three presidential advisers on three different programs [gave] three different descriptions of the trillion-dollar stimulus [...]
Walking Away From Your Mortgage (The New York Times)
John Courson, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.” Courson was implying that homeowners — record numbers of whom continue to default — have [...]
THE STORY THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: Road Projects Don’t Help Unemployment (Yahoo! Finance/AP)
Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn't matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment [...]
