We’re … screwed.
Nearly 19 percent of the workforce here in Bibleburg, which famously despises the big, bad feddle gummint, gets a paycheck from same, according to The Washington Post in partnership with the Brookings Institution.
Imagine that.
Now, whom do you suppose Bibleburg will blame for the hardship wrought upon these 55,000 big-gummint employees by the feddle shutdown?
I’ll give you a hint. Half black, socialist, crypto-Mooslim, Kenyan, tyrant … ring any bells?
As the coronation of King Socialist Muslim I proceeds in DeeCee, word on the streets in Bibleburg is that job growth locally is confined to pitching greaseballs at motorists through drive-up windows, answering phone calls from pissed-off Comcast customers and blowing shit up, in part because the locals are too fucking stupid to sell legal weed.
The good news is, gas is cheap for anyone who wants to leave town in search of greener pastures.
The local unemployment rate has been at or above 8.9 percent for three and a half years, and would be more like 12 percent had not some 4,000 Bibleburgers given up looking for work altogether, according to the Gazette.
Interestingly, local number-cruncher Tom Binnings of Summit Economics LLC estimates that 24 percent of Bibleburgers are self-employed, “making money where they can and finding a way to survive, but not much more.”
That number seemed steep at first, until I started thinking about most of the local folks I know. A couple are educators, one has a gummint job, and a few are private-sector employees, but a substantial percentage of the others is self-employed: artist, screen printer, construction contractor, bike-shop owner.
We’re not all struggling to survive, but I’m certain we’d all like to be doing better. Thing is, how do we get there? Ranching the view doesn’t put beans in your burrito, blowing shit up seems likely to go out of fashion if DeeCee ever gets serious about reining in spending, and cheap gas isn’t much of a solace if you have nowhere to go.
One wonders what goes through the president’s mind as he awakens each morning. Probably something like, “Aw, shit.”
The May jobs numbers suck, thanks in part to the Elefinks’ relentless croaking of anything resembling actual job-creation measures.
Here in Bibleburg, the unemployment rate nudged up to 9.2 percent in April, considerably worse than the statewide average of 7.9 percent, which is only marginally better than the 8.2 percent rate nationwide. The figures indicate that more than 28,000 of my friends and neighbors were looking for work, while an unknown number have simply given up the hunt.
And the folks who are supposed to be empowered to have a go at doing something about this? They’re too busy running for office, running from their records, or simply running their mouths.
As Charles P. Pierce notes: “We have 300,000 long-term unemployed who, all evidence indicates, their government largely has abandoned, and about whom their country’s corporate landlords could care even less. Perhaps this isn’t the best time in history for the president to be boasting regularly about how much federal spending he’s cut.”
Charles, a wiser and funnier man than I, warns that the prez “cannot win re-election on the merits if he’s mixing pale middle-class nostrums with deficit-hawk snake oil.” Troo dat, Brother Pierce. If enough Donks and indies get depressed, say “Fuck it” and stay home on Election Day, leaving Teh Crazy to jerk levers from San Fran to Savannah, we will be enjoying the tender mercies of President Romney come 2013.
Once again satire runs a very poor second to reality: Bibleburg recently pissed away $111,000 to come up with a new tagline — “Live It Up!” — along with a logo that would look right at home on a bottle of something or other.
Never mind that drunkards living it up in the Tejon Street saloon district, and then beating the shit out of/knifing/shooting each other in the streets after last call, are hardly the stuff of a solid Chamber of Commerce campaign in a town shunned by venture capitalists, where unemployment was pegged at 8.6 percent in September, slightly above the statewide average.
The new tagline is reminiscent of a similar campaign in Richard Russo’s “Nobody’s Fool,” led by a dimwitted huckster of a bank president who has the brainstorm of hanging a street banner that reads “Things Are Looking ↑ in Bath,” equating its brilliance with the fabled “I ♥ NY” campaign.
The citizenry and merchants of Bath “were not fetched by this argument,” wrote Russo. “They were waiting for something tangible. …”
As are the citizenry and merchants of Bibleburg, no doubt. Given our reputation for religious intolerance and right-wing idiocy, perhaps “Live It Down!” might have been closer to the mark.
Or how about this? “We’re Jobless, Broke and Hungry, and We Can’t Eat Scenery.” Or bullshit, either, for that matter.
Some of those tasty middle-class gigs that went away during The Great Recession aren’t coming back, says Kevin G. Hall at McClatchy.
It’s not exactly news — the author of the report cited, MIT economist David Autor, says the trend has been under way for more than a decade. But it got worse during the latest installment of hard times, with zero job growth for professionals and an 8 percent decline in office and administrative employment.
But wait, there’s more! Writes Hall: “This loss of middle-skill jobs — what Autor calls polarization of the job market — intersects with another discouraging trend, the concentration of wealth at the highest rungs of the wealth ladder.”
Another study, this one from UC-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, suggests “that the top 1 percent of earners in the nation captured almost half of the growth in income over a period of stellar growth in the U.S. economy.”
“And this,” Hall writes, “came against the backdrop of disappearing good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, and what now appears to be an escalating departure of well-paying middle-skill jobs.”
Like I said, hardly news — the rich getting richer is right up there with “Dog Bites Man,” headline-wise. But still, is it any wonder that Miss Mia Sopaipilla is checking under the range for loose change? She has no idea where her next bowl of kitty chow is coming from.
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