Earlier this week, a crucial index of manufacturing showed that growth had slipped slightly in July, chain stores reported anemic increases in sales and unemployment claims rose above the level usual for this stage of a recovery. On the more positive side, auto sales increased 5.1 percent in July compared with a year earlier, although from a very low base.
For now, companies appear nervous about expanding their payrolls. “Businesses just don’t want to hire,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics. “Workers are too costly and it’s very easy to substitute technology for labor.”
He added that with corporate earnings rising partly on the back of cost-cutting, employers are reluctant to give up profits. “So while corporate earnings were spectacular,” Mr. Sinai said, “the job market just stinks.”
Atlas is shrugging folks. I had thee job opportunities canceled because employers are sitting on the job. all I am getting is on one to five day gigs.
I told this story a couple of weeks ago here but I think it is worth repeating:
I was traveling with the CEO of a small company. They are having a good 2010 because they pared back to be able to make good money with modest demand. They are hiring only to replace the most critical people who retire, etc.
Expansion of [i]people[/i] vs modest debottlenecking capital projects is not on the radar. Their cash position is great. But the uncertainty of the future (taxes, regulations, ObamaCare, Financial reform, banking credit) have them sitting on their hands. [i]Their operating expectation is that things will get WORSE before they get better[/i]. What argument can anyone present to refute their outlook? If most companies in America have that outlook, what does that tell you about the next 6-12 months? If things suddenly got better tomorrow, the unempolyment needle would barely budge by the elections.
Nope, the Dems are going to take the lickin’ they so richly deserve.
The ideological fixation of the Democrat leadership in the Congress and in the Executive is fascinating.
They are facing serious, even catastrophic, political losses as indicated by most national polls and yet they will not take ‘common sense’ measures to stimulate small business and consumer spending at the bottom end of the nation’s economic food chain.
Instead, their eyes seem fixated on solving our economic problems through monolithic economic changes administered by an ‘elite’ of non-elected government bureaucrats at the the top of the economic food chain.
Even though, historically, the monolithic ‘top of the food chain’ management of the economy has been empirically proven to be high high risk and extremely costly when it fails. Further, the long term effects of top down interference with the free enterprise system and with individual liberties will stifle rather than stimulate economic growth.
Which shows that left-wing ideological orthodoxy trumps common sense or concern for the common man.
Something else to repeat: Rush’s two laws of political life.
1. Liberalism fails whenever it is tried
2. Liberals lie; they have to, no rational person wants to buy what they are selling. So they have to disquise it with eloquent words and grand images of compassion. But a lie, is a lie, is a lie.
Certainly Michelle “Antionette” Obama does not live by the sacrifices her husband called all the rest of us to make. And John Kerry reluctantly agreed to do his “patriotic duty” and pay hundreds of thousands in taxes on his new yacht that he had avoided by placing it in a no tax state.
#1,
At least you are getting some work. All I am getting are polite rejection letters and the reassurance from friends that I am very (over?) qualified and that something will turn up. Unfortunately, the increasing administrative and cost burden that this Administration has and is foisting on small businesses will only further discourage hiring.
My firm has a two year plan in place for possible scenarios. The best one of those is that we remain static. The rest presume we will shrink and need to shed space and people. At least here, there is no way anyone is going to hire new workers. We can’t afford them as it is, and it is obvious that employee costs are going to go through the roof in the future. With Obamacare, we have already seen a $2,000/year increase per employee family policy due to the mandate to insure dependents till age 26. The legislature this past session threatened to increase unemployment taxes by 2,000% per employee, and then congratulated themselves when they kept it to 600%. As I said in another thread, under the present structure employees are a liability to businesses, not an asset.
Government at all levels is strangling this country to death. And nothing is going to get better until that dynamic changes. We need to start by throwing everyone out of Congress. Then maybe some of the idiots in the professional political class will start paying attention to reality.