Labor Participation Hit Record 34-Year Low

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disability, Employment, Labor, Participation, Record Low

The percentage of Americans who have a job or are looking for one, known as the labor force participation rate (LFPR), has plunged to a 34-year low, according to a new report from staffing company Express Employment Professionals.

“Following the Great Recession, we’ve entered into the Great Shift,” says Express Employment Professionals CEO Bob Funk, who previously served as chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. “This is a period defined by the Boomer retirement, Millennial frustration, and growing reliance on government programs. All indicators suggest this shift is not sustainable.”

The New York Times reported on the study and suggested that “another cause [of the Great Shift] may be the rise in the number of workers on disability.”

A record 8,733,461 people now receive disability benefits, a figure greater than the population of New York City.

Today, nearly 90 million Americans are no longer in the labor force.

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VA Awards Million$ in Employee Bonuses Despite Massive Backlog in Veterans’ Disability Claims

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backlog, bonuses, disability, VA, Veteran Affairs, veterans

Two-thirds of employees at the Department of Veteran Affairs, which has been the subject of widespread criticism for its excessive delays in providing veterans their benefits, received bonuses at the end of 2011 for “excellent” or “outstanding” performance. Additionally, employees at some of the department’s most ineffective offices were more likely to receive bonuses than workers at some of its most productive offices.

The VA’s regional office in Oakland, Calif., gave about 90 percent of its employees bonuses despite having to temporarily shut down operations to retrain its under performing workers and, in a Baltimore office, about 40 percent of workers receive a bonus despite the office’s having the longest wait time nationally, according to a News21 investigation. Yet, at the Sioux Falls, S.D., office, which processes claims up to four times more efficiently than Oakland, less than a tenth of its employees saw a bonus, the same investigation found.

Overall, employees received about $5.5 million in bonuses. According to the report, the department’s performance standards encourage workers to push aside more complicated claims and process easier ones to ensure their job security and qualify for extra pay through a points system. One Veterans Benefits Administration official said in defense of the bonuses, ”There are many, many employees who are exceeding their minimum standards, and they deserve to be recognized for that.”

The agency’s standards no longer allow employees to earn points for “supplemental development” — that is, making follow-up contacts and going through other documents in an effort to minimize the time employees spend on such issues. But as a result, the quality of work has worsened – documents show that nearly three-quarters of appeal claims were either done incorrectly or without complete information and that approximately 14,000 veterans had pending appeals of more than two years.

One employee told News21 that the current process “breeds cheating,” as employees resort to “survival mode” and work only on easy claims at the expense of backlog claims. “Your backlog is over here. But your points are in this direction. How stupid is that?” one employee said.

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MORE OBAMA LIES: Report Finds Health Care Premiums Climbed $2,976 Since 2009

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Broken Promises, healthcare, Obama, obamacare, premiums

The average employer-provided family health insurance premiums have climbed $2,976 since 2009, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation survey released this week. They’re up $3,671 compared with the year before President Obama took office. That’s despite Obama’s repeated promises that the health care reform law he championed would cut premiums by $2,500 in his first term.

And while annual premium increases have moderated over the past two years, that’s due to trends in the insurance market largely unrelated to ObamaCare, and trends the law could actually reverse.

The Kaiser survey found that the average family premium this year is $16,351, up 4% over last year, and up 22% since 2009. After adjusting for inflation, premiums climbed an average 3.2% a year in Obama’s first term, higher than the 2.7% average during President Bush’s last four years in office.

During his first campaign for president, Obama repeatedly claimed that his health reform plan would, as he said at a Virginia rally in 2008 “lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”

Nevertheless, the White House has been touting recent signs of health cost moderation as evidence that ObamaCare is “already working to reduce costs.”

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SHOCKER: Black Unemployment Twice the Rate of White Unemployment Under Obama

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Black Unemployment, blacks, Change We Can Believe In, Hope and Change, Jobless, Jobs, Obama

Shocking News Ahead…

Black unemployment, which at the end of the Bush administration broke a decades-long pattern of being twice white unemployment, has resumed its disturbing and prolonged trend under President Obama, with the rate among African Americans now at 13.4 percent, according to a new Pew Research report.

In a report timed for release on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” speech, Pew said on Thursday: “Much has changed for African-Americans since the 1963 March on Washington (which, recall, was a march for ‘Jobs and Freedom’), but one thing hasn’t: The unemployment rate among blacks is about double that among whites, as it has been for most of the past six decades.”

The trend broke at the end of former President George W. Bush’s administration as the recession hit whites more, temporarily boosting their unemployment rate.

№ 2 Official at IRS Commutes to Work — by Plane! Costing Taxpayers Millions

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commute, expenses, Extreme, IRS, plane, taxes, travel

A handful of top executives at the Internal Revenue Service ran up “extremely high travel expenses” in 2011 and 2012, according to a new report from Treasury Department inspector general J. Russell George.

The report indicates that these executives work primarily in Washington, D.C., but live elsewhere, and fly to Washington routinely. In 2011 and 2012, twelve IRS executives spent over 200 days traveling each year; in some cases, the number of travel days they logged actually exceeded the number of business days in the calendar because they remained in “travel status” on weekends and holidays.

An IRS source tells National Review Online at least two of the executives commuting to D.C. by plane work at the highest echelons of the agency. They include Beth Tucker, one of two deputy commissioners, and Laurel Cummings, the director of compliance strategy and policy for the Affordable Care Act. Both live in Texas but work primarily in Washington, D.C. Tucker reports directly to the IRS commissioner and Cummings reports to Sarah Hall Ingram, the director of the IRS office responsible for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

HHS Secretly Hires 86 Criminal Investigators to Probe Obamacare Violators

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Criminal, Health and Human Services, HHS, investigation, obamacare, Violators

• Post-Obamacare law hiring at the Department of Health and Human Services included 86 ‘criminal investigators,’ but just two ‘consumer safety’ officers
• On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority to make 1,814 new hires
  
• The authorization included positions for 50 criminal investigators. The agency increased that number to 86
  
• The agency was also authorized to hire  261 ‘consumer safety officers.’ Only two such employees were hired

More than 1,600 new employees hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage include just two described as ‘consumer safety’ officers, but 86 tasked with ‘criminal investigating’ – indicating that the agency is building an army of detectives to sleuth out violations of a law that many in Congress who supported it still find confusing.

On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency ‘Direct Hiring Authority’ order.

The Obama administration ordered that employment expansion despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

Bank of America Intern Dies after Working 3 Straight Days

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Bank of America, Dies, intern, Moritz Erhardt

A 21-year-old intern who worked grueling hours at Bank of America‘s London office died just a week before his internship was to conclude.

Moritz Erhardt, a University of Michigan student from Germany, reportedly had worked until 6 a.m. for three days straight and was found dead in his flat. Erhardt, who suffered from epilepsy, collapsed in his shower, according to reports.

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the news of Moritz Erhardt’s death,” BofA said in a statement. “He was popular amongst his peers and was a highly diligent intern at our company with a promising future. Our first thoughts are with his family and we send our condolences to them at this difficult time

John McIvor, the bank’s head of international communications, told CNBC.com that he could not confirm the circumstances surrounding Erhardt’s death, though he did provide some insight into the life of an intern.

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Amazon Website Goes Down for 40 Minutes, Costing the Company $5 Million

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Amazon, outage, Website

Amazon.com’s website went down around 1 p.m. Pacific time today for as much as 45 minutes due to unknown causes.

The outage appears to have affected Amazon’s main website for all U.S. and Canadian visitors. VentureBeat was able to confirm that it was offline for at least 20 minutes, and the website Down For Everyone or Just Me also confirmed the outage for that time period.

Estimates differ on exactly how long Amazon was offline: Some reports have it at 15 minutes,  25 minutes, 40 minutes, and 45 minutes. At 40 minutes, the outage could have cost the company as much as $4.72 million in lost sales, the Puget Sound Business Journal estimated, based on the company’s average sales of $117,882 per minute. Of course, that’s an average rate, and sales at the online retailer might be expected to be much brisker on a Monday afternoon in the summer, when people are shirking work by ordering barbecue tools, Hawaiian shirts, boxes of cheap outdoor drink tumblers, or trashy novels to read on their Kindles.

Fed’s Ownership of U.S. Debt Breaks $2T for First Time

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debt, Federal Reserve, Ownership, U.S. Government

(CNSNews.com) – The Federal Reserve’s holdings of publicly traded U.S. Treasury securities—federal government debt—pushed above $2 trillion for the first time last week, hitting approximately $2,001,093,000,000 as of Aug. 14, according to the Fed’s latest weekly accounting.

The Fed’s accounting for the previous week showed that it had owned approximately $1,993,375,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities as of Aug. 7.

Back on Dec. 31, 2008, before the Fed began its strategy of “Quantitative Easing,” the Fed owned only $475.9 billion in U.S. Treasury securities. Since then, the Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt have more than quadrupled.

Launched in 2009, the Fed’s Quantitative Easing (QE) efforts have attempted to stimulate the economy.

THE AMATEUR: Obama’s Economic Approval Plunges to 35%

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Economy, Obama, Plunges, poll

PRINCETON, NJ — Despite President Barack Obama’s renewed focus on the nation’s economy this summer, he scores worse with Americans on the economy than he did in June. His approval rating on the issue, now 35%, is down seven percentage points, and his ratings on taxes and the federal budget deficit are each down five points. During the same period, his overall approval rating is down three points.

In fact, out of seven issues for which Obama’s job performance was rated in the new poll and in June, only the three economy-related ones fell significantly. These are also his lowest issue approval ratings of the nine total issues measured this month. Notably, these declines somewhat parallel the slide Gallup has seen in Americans’ economic confidence over the same period, although confidence picked up slightly this past week.

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