by Jeff Davis. The Obama White House and the Democrat Party have been twisting, turning and doing flips like an organ-grinder’s monkey in order to explain the continuing rise in American unemployment. Their latest excuse for the Obama Depression is: Blame it on the weather.
An article from CNN Money.com reports: “The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12% over the past two weeks, the government said Thursday. There were 496,000 initial job claims filed in the week ended Feb. 20, up 22,000 from a revised 474,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in a weekly report. The prior week, there were 442,000 claims filed. ‘This is certainly not surprising given the very adverse weather conditions for the eastern half of the country, especially in the major population areas,’ said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services. ‘Weather has a huge impact, particularly with things like construction, which remains very soft. Over the past few weeks, the Northeast, particularly the Washington area, has been hit with snow storms, putting people out of work and resulting in a backlog of claims that the Labor Department wasn’t able to process until this week.’ “
Didn’t the construction industry pretty much get devastated at the start of this financial crisis? Construction always is the first casualty. No one wants to build new houses if they can’t sell them at a substantial profit. Right now, there are about 19 million homes that have been foreclosed and are glutting the market. So how could the snow be affecting non-existent construction in the east?
The snow in the east does not explain rising unemployment in places like California, Texas and Florida. A new excuse will have to be invented for those states.
The CNN Money.com article notes “Excluding the weather’s impact, Dye would have expected initial claims to decline at a healthy rate of 10,000 to 20,000 last week. The government said 4,617,000 people filed continuing claims in the week ended Feb. 13, the most recent data available. That’s up 6,000 from the preceding week’s revised 4,611,000 claims. The 4-week moving average for ongoing claims rose by 4,250 to 4,600,750 from the previous week’s revised 4,596,500.”
I wonder what excuses they will give us in April, May and June as unemployment continues to grow then? The Obama “recovery” is beginning to look like Global Warming. All the recent data argues against it, and there seems to be a preponderance of fraud attempting to prop it up.
Blaming the weather is a bit out there. These people are really reaching to try and explain away with smoke and mirrors something that is absolutely and totally their fault: the continuing destruction of the private sector which actually creates wealth and jobs. The Democrats are going to keep on destroying this country until they are stopped. Replacing this Congress with Republicans in November is only a half measure. They conspired with the Democrats to pass NAFTA and GATT, which paved the way for exporting our factories to the Third World.
The Obama regime is so colossally incompetent and bungling that almost any change would be an improvement. The continuing collapse of the economy will at least ensure one thing: Obama will lose in 2012. A new expression has popped up around the Internet for Obama: OTP –which stands for One Term President.
