Small-business owners are more concerned about the administration’s emerging $1 trillion healthcare plan, which will drive up their costs, and with the new taxes that are aimed squarely at the income groups into which owners of small firms generally fall. So they won’t expand or hire.

Which is why the White House is so unhappy. The only indicator that matters to the president is jobs, jobs, jobs, about which he quizzes his staff every day. That’s another way of saying votes, votes, votes. The latest polls show that the portion of Americans approving Obama’s handling of the economy has dropped from 58% to 50% in the past six months, approval of his handling of the deficit is down from 49% to 40% and that 67% believe it is “not possible” that his healthcare plan will not add to the deficit. Nevertheless, the president remains personally popular. He would like to keep it that way and is considering a programme that would give tax credits to employers who add to their workforces.

Consumers are the third unhappy group, completing the gloomy business-political-consumer troika.

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North Charleston won the fiercely fought battle for a Boeing 787 aircraft assembly plant Wednesday, thrusting South Carolina onto the world stage of aircraft manufacturing.

The Boeing Co. will build the new line at its Charleston International Airport property instead of in Everett, Wash., the nation’s aviation nerve center and longtime home of the company’s commercial airplane business.

The decision was announced after state lawmakers wrapped up a two-day special session in which they approved a rich basket of financial incentives for Boeing valued at $450 million by state Sen. Hugh Leatherman, a Florence Republican who heads the Senate Finance Committee.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Americans are growing increasingly pessimistic about the economy after a mild upswing of attitudes in September. But Republicans haven’t been able to profit politically from the economic gloom, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The survey found a country in a decidedly negative mood, nearly a year after the election of President Obama. For the first time during the Obama presidency, a majority of Americans sees the country as being on the wrong track.

Fifty-eight percent of those polled say the economic slide still has a ways to go, up from 52% in September and back to the level of pessimism expressed in July. Only 29% said the economy had “pretty much hit bottom,” down from 35% last month.

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The economy remains unsteady 22 months after the recession began, with banks restricting credit and consumers hunkering down. For these small businesses, and many others across the country, there’s an additional dark cloud: uncertainty created by Washington’s bid to reorganize a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

The economic contraction is of course the prime force driving companies to lay off workers. But a health-care overhaul grinding through Congress could bring unknown new obligations to insure employees. Bush-era tax cuts are set to end next year, and their fate is unclear. Legislation aimed at tackling climate change might raise businesses’ energy costs. Meanwhile, a bill aimed at increasing transportation spending is stalled.

Many companies say they have responded by freezing hiring, cutting benefits and delaying expansion plans. With at least 60% of job growth historically coming out of the small-business sector, according to the government’s Small Business Administration, that kind of inertia could impede an economic recovery.

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For the millions of Americans without a job, “it’s a depression,” Biden said.

“My grandpop used to say — there was a suburb of Scranton called Minooka. He said, ”˜When the guy in Minooka’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother- in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression,'” Biden said.

“Well, it’s a depression — it’s a depression for millions of Americans, through no fault of their own,” he said.

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California lost more than five times as many jobs in September as it did the month before, signaling that the state’s employment woes continue despite a budding economic recovery.

Employers cut 39,300 workers from their payrolls last month, according to figures released Friday by the state Employment Development Department, led by cuts in construction and government.

A separate survey of joblessness showed that California’s unemployment rate was 12.2% in September, down from a revised 12.3% in August. But that decline wasn’t a reflection of a stronger job market. The rate fell only because thousands of jobless Californians gave up searching for work last month and were no longer counted as unemployed.

“It is discouraging,” said Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University. “We want to see job losses go down and the pace slow down, but we didn’t see it.”

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The inherent contradiction in the term “jobless recovery” continues to cast a shadow on overdue good economic news. The Dow Jones Industrial average closed above 10,000 Wednesday for the first time in more than a year. But the national unemployment rate of 9.8 percent in September was the highest in more than a quarter century.

As The Associated Press reported Thursday, though the economic recovery apparently has begun, it “is widely expected to be weak, particularly when it comes to employment.”

And as The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, about 30,000 jobs “have been directly created or saved by contractors who received money” from the $787 billion federal stimulus package that President Barack Obama signed into law eight months ago. That’s far fewer than the 1 million jobs promised by the White House — and not nearly enough to make a dent in those ominous unemployment figures.

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In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

State workers in Georgia are taking home smaller paychecks. So are the tens of thousands of employees in California’s public university system. The steel company Nucor and the technology giant Hewlett-Packard have embraced the practice. So have several airlines and many small businesses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut. The old record was a two-month decline, during the 1981-1982 recession.

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The idea of a tax credit for companies that create new jobs, something the federal government has not tried since the 1970s, is gaining support among economists and Washington officials grappling with the highest unemployment in a generation.

The proposal has some bipartisan appeal among politicians eager both to help their unemployed constituents and to encourage small-business development. Legislators on Capitol Hill and President Obama’s economic team have been quietly researching the policy for several weeks.

“There is a lot of traction for this kind of idea,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip. “If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.”

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With unemployment expected to rise well into next year even as the economy slowly recovers, the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are discussing extending several safety net programs as well as proposing new tax incentives for businesses to renew hiring.

President Obama’s economic team discussed a wide range of ideas at a meeting on Monday, following his Saturday radio address in which he said it would “explore additional options to promote job creation.” But officials emphasized that a decision was still far off and that in any event the effort would not add up to a second economic stimulus package, only an extension of the first.

“We’re thinking through all additional potential strategies for accelerating job creation,” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod.

Read it all.

Check out the second chart–it is very sobering.

Update:In a time of globalization, this chart is fascinating also (make sure to click to enlarge).

Vigeland: You spoke with about a thousand workers, non-management types about their perspectives on work. What did you hear?

Davis: We were somewhat surprised to hear that over half of these workers feel that their careers are stagnant or in limbo.

Vigeland: And did they tell you why?

Davis: Yes, they did. How I would term this is they said that they were “in the no.” They had no challenging assignments, they have no opportunities to learn new skills, they have no room to advance, they get no recognition and they have no line of sight to how their jobs fit in with the objectives of the organization.

Vigeland: Then how do those feelings of stagnation manifest themselves in the workplace. What’s happening?

Davis: People are going to actively seek new jobs as the economy improves. People are saying things like, “I just do what’s asked of me, nothing more, nothing less. I just do my job and go home.” As opposed to people that say, “I’m interested in what I do, I’m excited about going to work.” And it has a negative impact on productivity and quality and customer service in organizations.

I caught this last night while running some errands and it blew my mind. Over 50%! Incredible. Read or listen to it all.

Employers cut another 263,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high of 9.8%, raising worries that the persistently weak labor market could undermine a nascent economic recovery from the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression.

The economy, by most accounts, has begun to grow again. But Friday’s Labor Department report underscored the risk that without jobs, consumers won’t have income to spend and that will restrain growth and give employers little reason to resume hiring after 21 consecutive months of job losses.

The bleak report comes amid continuing talks between the White House and Congress on extending of some parts of the stimulus package enacted in February, such as unemployment benefits and health-insurance subsidies.

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The American economy shed another 263,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, reinforcing a broad assumption that many more months of lean times lie ahead for working people.

The latest snapshot of the nation’s job market released by the Labor Department on Friday amplified the notion that the recession has probably ended, as a technical matter. Though the job market continued to worsen, the pace of deterioration remained markedly slower than earlier in the year, when roughly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing.

Yet the report added to the sentiment that the economic expansion, which is probably under way, will be weak and tentative, with scarce paychecks and anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.

“This is a weak report,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The rate of job loss has tapered off, but we still haven’t reached the point where businesses are willing to hire.”

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Sometimes it seems the only way to find a new job is through divine intervention. And a clean suit can’t hurt. Both can be found with the help of a local nonprofit called Priority Two, and a dry cleaning service in Pine.

Priority Two, based in North Way Christian Community in Marshall, has been offering moral support and training people to look for work successfully since the recession of 1982.

Brothers Todd and Scott Fennell, of Natrona Heights in Harrison, have operated their Martinizing Dry Cleaning franchise in Pine Tree Shops on Route 19 in Pine since last May, but they have already joined with Priority Two to offer a one-time, free dry cleaning of professional attire for unemployed people facing the all-important job interview.

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First, consumer indebtedness is still too high relative to income expectations and credit availability, particularly in the US and the UK. This inconsistency will hold back any sustainable bounce in the most important component of aggregate demand.

Second, some banks’ balance sheets are still too geared for the comfort of regulators or their own managers. This will inhibit them from lending to the real economy at a time when certain sectors (such as commercial real estate, but also residential housing) still require significant refinancing, and when consumers need time to work down their excessive debt loads.

Third, unemployment has risen well beyond expectations, and is likely to prove unusually protracted. It will take years for US unemployment to return to its natural rate, even after the natural rate shifted upwards. This will dampen the recovery of consumption and investment, stress social contracts that assume flexible labour markets, and endanger political support for essential structural reforms.

Finally, public debt has grown so rapidly as to spark concerns about future debt dynamics….

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County expenses have been growing at about 6 percent annually, but revenue has grown only about 2 percent a year.

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The Rev. John Graham at Grace Church, an Episcopal parish in Georgetown, has held an adult forum every Sunday morning since the weekend after Labor Day to help people hurt by the recession.

“When people are dealing with unemployment, they don’t feel like they’re productive members in the society,” Graham said. “They doubt the sense of their meaning, and some even hide from their neighbors because they feel so much shame. They tend to think they’re not useful.”

He said the class has about 25 to 30 people, a significant number considering the size of the church, which has about 100 people at Sunday service.

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Inside the Simonton Windows factory here, some workers who are back on the job after being laid off for months believe they are proof that the darkest days of the recession are over.

“They’re saying things are getting better, and people don’t seem as worried,” says Cammie Hixson, 49, who was laid off for almost four months. “I think the economy has turned around.”

Elaine Armstrong, 65, was laid off by Simonton for four months. Now that she’s back at work, she says, “I’m very hopeful. I think we’re all going to be OK now.”

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Several hundred people have been marching through Pittsburgh’s predominantly black Hill District demanding jobs in a protest ahead of the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in the city this week.

Marchers held signs demanding “Jobs not jail” and calling for “economic justice.” The “Bail Out The People Movement” organizers are also calling for an end to foreclosures and evictions….

One reverend said churches in America need to speak up for the unemployed.

Friar Luis Barrios, of the Episcopal Church in New York, said, “If the church keeps silent in front of this reality, it is not fair.”

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If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites ”” a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the “prosperity gospel.” Since “God wants to prosper you,” all you have to do to get something is “name it and claim it.” A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, “I want my stuff ”” right now!”

Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God’s urgings ”” conveyed by his wife ”” to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.” If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-’00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.

But you didn’t need a dodgy mortgage to be wiped out by the subprime crisis and ensuing recession. Black unemployment is now at 15.1 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. By 2010, according to Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, 40 percent of African-Americans nationwide will have endured patches of unemployment or underemployment.

One result is that blacks are being hit by a second wave of foreclosures caused by unemployment.

This makes the heart very sad–read it all.

It was not a lesson Lawrence Summers mastered with great ease. But after nearly a decade working beside sphinxlike Alan Greenspan, and having watched his own tenure as president of Harvard cut short by a phrase that slipped too nimbly from brain to mouth, Summers, director of the President’s National Economic Council, has become a restrained public man. Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that ran through the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in July when Summers looked up from his prepared speech, flashed a grin and loosed the sort of utterance that once upon a time marked imminent indiscretion. “There was,” he told the room, “a fight about whether I was allowed to say this now that I work in the White House.”

What Summers proceeded to offer was, in fact, an unusually candid insight. And though couched in jargon, it was an insider’s confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun’s law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it’s really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It’s a labor version of how the accelerator on your car works: add gas, go faster; less gas, go slower.

What made Summers’ frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun’s law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. “I don’t think,” Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd ”” deviating again from his text ”” “that anyone fully understands this phenomenon.” And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that much slower too? Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession? Has the idea of full employment rather suddenly become antiquated? Is there something fundamentally broken in the heart of our economy? And if so, how can we fix it?

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Still, worry remains, making future hiring unlikely. Rockwell’s customers have resumed replacing older gear, but have not begun full-scale expansions, which would generate much more business.

Factory managers doubt whether American consumers ”” still reeling from lost jobs and savings ”” can snap back vigorously enough to restore manufacturing.

“I’ve got 22 years of experience and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mike Laszkiewicz, 48, vice president and general manager of Rockwell’s power control business. “This is a tough one. I’m a little uncertain which way this is going to go.”

Read it all–this one is on the front page of today’s print edition.

Economists and consumers are feeling better about the economy a year after the most frightening moments of the financial crisis. Forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, giving the government generally good marks for its handling of the financial crisis, now see employers slowly adding jobs over the next 12 months.

And the latest reading of consumer spirits shows signs of optimism. But most economists still expect the unemployment rate will climb to 10.2%, from today’s 9.7%, before falling early next year.

“We are in a technical recovery, but risks remain abundant,” said Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial. “It will still take some luck and skill to get Main Street to feel some of the relief Wall Street has felt.”

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They were left out of the latest unemployment rate, as they are every month: millions of hidden casualties of the Great Recession who are not counted in the rate because they have stopped looking for work.

But that does not mean these discouraged Americans do not want to be employed. As interviews with several of them demonstrate, many desperately long for a job, but their inability to find one has made them perhaps the ultimate embodiment of pessimism as this recession wears on.

Some have halted their job searches out of sheer frustration. Others have decided it makes more sense to become stay-at-home fathers or mothers, or to go back to school, until the job market improves. Still others have chosen to retire for now and have begun collecting Social Security or disability benefits, for which claims have surged.

Rick Alexander, a master carpenter in Florida who has given up searching after months of effort, said the disappointment eventually became unbearable.

Read it all.

From here:

On this weekend, when we rest from our usual labors, loving Father, we pray for all who shoulder the tasks of human labor””in the marketplace, in factories and offices, in the professions, and in family living.

We thank you, Lord, for the gift and opportunity of work; may our efforts always be pure of heart, for the good of others and the glory of your name.

We lift up to you all who long for just employment and those who work to defend the rights and needs of workers everywhere.

May those of us who are now retired always remember that we still make a valuable contribution to our Church and our world by our prayers and deeds of charity.

May our working and our resting all give praise to you until the day we share together in eternal rest with all our departed in your Kingdom as you live and reign Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

It was just five months ago that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made the New Flyer bus factory here a symbol of the stimulus. With several cabinet secretaries in tow, he held a town-hall-style meeting at the factory, where he praised the company as “an example of the future” and said that it stood to get more orders for its hybrid electric buses thanks to the $8.4 billion that the stimulus law devotes to mass transit.

But last month, the company that administration officials had pictured as a stimulus success story began laying off 320 people, or 13 percent of its work force, having discovered how cutbacks at the state level can dampen the boost provided by the federal stimulus money. The Chicago Transit Authority did use some of its stimulus money to buy 58 new hybrid buses from New Flyer. But Chicago had to shelve plans to order another 140 buses from them after the state money that it had hoped to use to pay for them failed to materialize. The delayed order scrambled New Flyer’s production schedule for the rest of the year, and led to the layoffs.

One of those laid off was David Wahl, 52, who had worked there for a decade and who sat behind the vice president at the town-hall-style meeting, soaking up the optimism of the moment. “With mass transit being pushed so hard,” Mr. Wahl recalled, “I figured I’d be able to work until I was 75.”

Read it all.

The job market continued its long, steep decline in August, with the jobless rate soaring to 9.7 percent and employers continuing to shed jobs, albeit at a slower rate than expected.

Analysts generally believe that economic output began rising by late summer. But new Labor Department data released Friday morning shows that that improvement isn’t yet flowing through to the job market, as employers remain highly reluctant to add staff.

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To the long list of reasons American companies aren’t hiring ”” business losses, tight credit, consumer retrenchment ”” add the fact that many of their older workers are unable, or afraid, to retire.

In other parts of the developed world, people are retiring as planned, because of relatively flush state and corporate pensions that await them. But here in the United States, financial security in old age rests increasingly on private savings, which have taken a beating in the last year. Prospective retirees are clinging to their jobs despite some cherished life plans.

As a result, companies are not only reluctant to create new jobs, but have fewer job openings to fill from attrition. For the 14 million Americans looking for work ”” a number expected to rise in Friday’s jobs report for August ”” this lack of turnover has made a tough job market even tougher.

Consider Barbara Petrucci, a dialysis nurse who had expected to stop working soon, or at least scale back to part time. Now that her family savings have been depleted by market declines, she expects to stay on the job for a long, long time.

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Among the flotsam and jetsam that gather over the years in a home, there is now the random taillight behind the Winklers’ living room couch. And a 1967 Buick Riviera dashboard under the desk. When jobs are short and the savings account dwindles, selling spare parts on the Internet can help put braces in mouths, and pay a credit card bill or two.

“Check it out,” Phil Winkler said, hoisting a chrome piece of trunk onto his lap. “This one is next.”

Unemployed for a year, Mr. Winkler, 41, who until last August had never lost a job, has sold his favorite car, canceled the cable and is now scavenging junkyards for auto parts that he resells on eBay.

It is a role that Mr. Winkler, a teddy-bearish, clean-cut guy ”” the sort whose tattoo from the first gulf war is thoroughly unintimidating ”” has stopped wearing with discomfort. It is boring, it is unpleasant, but it is also something he has learned to live with, as he has made the transition from the primary breadwinner for his family of four to its bus driver, disciplinarian, schedule organizer and head chef.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s NY Times.