Nevada Unemployment Office

2012 campaigns and the downgrade effect

The reverberation from that demotion means that Electoral College math (270 electoral votes needed to win) is now on a collision course with budget math (trillions of dollars in reduced spending and increased taxes), and labor market math (14 million unemployed).

Of the 10 states that now have the highest unemployment rates, Obama won six of them in 2008.

Four of them — Nevada, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina — account for nearly a quarter of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Obama targets states on high-unemployment list The states which Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has identified as 2012 targets are the ones Obama won in 2008 but where Republicans won statewide races in 2010: that list overlaps in part with the high-unemployment roster: Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida.

With the United States now in what S&P calls “an era of fiscal stringency and private-sector deleveraging,” that fiscal stringency is daunting for Obama’s re-election chances. Cuts in federal spending to reduce the government’s debt will likely slow economic growth in the short run, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But Obama contended Monday from the White House that “there are plenty of good ideas about how to achieve long-term deficit reduction that doesn’t hamper economic growth right now.”

And he said, “By coming together to deal with the long-term debt challenge, we would have more room to implement key proposals that can get the economy to grow faster,” such as extending the current reduction in the Social Security payroll tax and providing unemployment insurance to those on the brink of exhausting their benefits.

Together those two steps would supply a stimulus of about $170 billion for one year — compared to the $830 billion four-year stimulus which is now beginning to taper off.

The next significant political moment comes next week when the top four congressional leaders announce their appointees to the new joint committee that will in November recommend another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

Obama acknowledged on Monday that there was skepticism that the members of the joint committee would accomplish anything. But in an allusion to the S&P downgrade he said, “My hope is that Friday’s news will give us a renewed sense of urgency.”

Who will serve on new 'super-committee'? Might that committee produce the compromise that Obama seeks?

Harry & Shelley Spent $490000 To Create 1.72 Jobs In Clark County

When Las Vegas Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and her liberal mentor Harry Reid rubberstamped Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus into law, they promised the legislation would ‘create or save’ 34,000 jobs in Nevada.

Since the stimulus was signed into law, Nevada’s unemployment rate has risen from 10.4 percent to 12.4 percent.  To make matters worse, the Nevada News Bureau has reported that $490,000 of the federal stimulus money was spent on planting trees around Clark County, but this project only created 1.72 jobs.

As the Nevada News Bureau reports :

“If a $490,000 grant to plant trees in Clark County public places as part of a federal job-creating stimulus project should be measured by the ‘greening’ of Southern Nevada, then the effort might be considered a modest success. … But if job creation to help the country out of the ‘great recession’ is the measure of success, then the funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the Clark County ‘Nursery Greening Project’ is not likely to win high marks.  … The federal website that monitors American Recovery and Reinvestment Act projects, reports the tree planting grant has created 1.72 jobs.”   (Sean Whaley, Hundreds Of Trees Planted But Few Jobs Created In Clark County Federal Stimulus Project, Nevada News Bureau , 08/07/11)

“Shelley Berkley’s $787 billion stimulus was a boondoggle, because not only did her stimulus fail to lower Nevada’s unemployment rate, a half a million dollars was spent to create 1.72 jobs,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Jahan Wilcox.  “With an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, Nevada simply cannot afford Shelley Berkley’s – or her primary opponent Byron Georgiou – job-killing, tax-and-spend agenda that is bankrupting our country.”    “From incentives to increase clean energy production to funding for work on I-15 and the Las Vegas Beltway, this [stimulus] package will mean jobs for Nevada at a time when we continue to face record unemployment levels,” said Berkley. “According to the White House, passage of this legislation will create or save 34,000 jobs statewide, with the majority of those in Clark County.