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© 2013 The Sandwich Democratic Town Committee
Tucked away in last month’s employment report — a report that you may recall carried the happy surprise of an increase of more than 230,000 new jobs and a 2/10 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate — was a statistic that surprised experts. Among the jobs added were 48,000 new construction jobs. That made specialists sit up straight in a hurry. It signaled a surprising turnaround might be on the way for the housing market.
Today, we have confirmation of that suspicion and it appears to be unusually robust. The New York Times reports a “Sudden Rise in Home Demand Takes Builders By Surprise.” The story comments that after six years of sitting on the sidelines home buyers are streaming back into the market, a market that apparently has scant inventory for sale. In Sacramento, where the decline in the housing market was among the worst in the country, the median sales price has increased 15% in the last year. Across the country, home prices are up an average of 7.3 percent.
The housing turnaround seems to have caught almost everyone in the business by surprise. As desirable as the long-awaited improvement may be, the unusually low level of homes for sale is creating widespread problems for buyers and sellers alike, leading to bidding wars and bubblelike price jumps in places that not long ago were suffering from major declines.
The positive effects of these kinds of trends tend to build on each other and lead to better, greater results over the long term. This is good news for the country and for the Democrats, but not such good news for the negativists and doomsayers among Republicans who seem to still be intent on making this President fail.
Have you no shame, Mr. Reid? Have you no shame Mr. McConnell? Have we no shame, we the electorate, we the citizens of a country that grandly and sometimes grandiosely proclaims loudly and expansively our pride in “American exceptionalism”? Does “exceptionalism” mean that when our Founding Fathers wrote about our inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” they meant “except” when one of us loves guns so much we just have to have a military grade weapon loaded with a 100-round magazine?
“Why is the ban being dropped? According to Democratic leaders, it has no chance of passing — and if it were included, Democrats wouldn’t even be able to bring it up on the Senate floor for debate. Just bringing a bill up for consideration requires all senators to agree, and if just one objects, then it takes 60 votes to keep the process moving forward.” – NBC News
How does any American politician gather up the where-with-all to stand before broadcast media, to stand before the American electorate and with a straight face proclaim that he/she must strip a ban on private ownership of military-grade armaments out of a bill because its presence would cause a filibuster?
Photo by Yuri Gripas / Reuters.
Really!? There are not 60 out of 100 United States Senators, senators in an “exceptional” nation, who are willing to trade the mere act of purchasing a military weapon because they like them, because they have a supposed “right” to possess one, for the possibility that doing so would prevent 20 more 6-7 year olds from being murdered? Have you no shame?
Well, enjoy your “right.” Enjoy your political “realities” and parliamentary “procedures” and Senate “rules”. Enjoy them now, because the screams of the next child to be riddled by a hail of bullets from a military grade weapon someone purchased because they like them, will echo up and down the halls of heaven for all eternity.
The employment report for September produced startling results but that didn’t stop Republicans from trying mightily to “spin” the report in their favor. Don’t fall for it! There are some critical facts in that report that we should keep in mind whenever we discuss the economy and employment with friends, neighbors, and colleagues.
- 114,000 new private sector jobs created in September: this is not great of course but it does display continued upward growth in the job market;
- The unemployment rate dropped to 7.8%: in the past critics could point to a decline as possibly coming from people giving up on finding work and who therefore dropped out of the job market, but not this time…
- A whopping 873,000 more people reported being employed than in the previous month. Note that this number comes from household surveys and is therefore distinct from the “new” jobs number which is focused on new positions created in the private sector.
- The unemployment rate (7.8%) and the number of unemployed (12.1 million) match where those numbers stood when President Obama was unaugurated, before the full brunt of the Great Recession had manifested itself.
- +325,000: The economy has now gotten back all of the jobs lost since January, 2009, and then some.
It’s hard to believe that Republican candidates and members of Congress actually hope ill for the economy and people’s employment but that sure seems like what they are doing. They were so bewildered by the good numbers for September that they actually went on a campaign of accusing Democrats of cooking the books, falsifying the report by shaping it to make the President look good as he runs for re-election. Just about everyone honest observer, including Republicans, condemned that effort as irresponsible and wildly off the mark.
Source: Huffington Post
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