The ACA’s overall impact on employment, however, will arguably be larger than that of any single piece of legislation since World War II.

Much of the ACA’s tax effect resembles unemployment insurance: both encourage layoffs and discourage people from returning to work.

Starting this year, the United States’ working population will face three major employment disincentives resulting from the very benefits the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides: (1) an explicit tax on full-time work, (2) an implicit tax on full-time work for those who are ineligible for the ACA’s health insurance subsidies, and (3) an implicit tax that links the amount of available subsidies to workers’ incomes.

A new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University advances the understanding of how much these ACA taxes will reduce overall employment, and why. It concludes that the reduction will be nearly double that projected by previous analyses. Labor markets ultimately will reduce weekly employment per person by about 3 percent—translating to roughly 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers.

Below is a brief summary of this important update. Please see “The Affordable Care Act and the New Economics of Part-Time Work” to read the entire study and to learn more about author Casey B. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

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Immigrant Gains and Native Losses In the Job Market, 2000 to 2013

Great charts:

It would be a mistake to think that every job taken by an immigrant is a job lost by a native. But it would also be a mistake to think that dramatically increasing the supply of workers has no impact on the employment prospects of natives. The idea that there are jobs American's don't do is simply not supported by the data. Moreover, there is good research showing that immigrants displace natives from the labor market.

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Retailers are cutting worker hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades

Thanks Barack… Retailers Cut Hours At Rate Not Seen in 3 Decades – Due to Obamacare

USA TODAY: Health care law may mean less hiring in 2013

Many businesses plan to bring on more part-time workers next year, trim the hours of full-time employees or curtail hiring because of the new health care law, human resource firms say.

Their actions could further dampen job growth, which already is threatened by possible federal budget cutbacks resulting from the tax increases and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff.

"It will have a negative impact on job creation" in 2013, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. . .

The so-called employer mandate to offer health coverage doesn't take effect until Jan. 1, 2014. But to determine whether employees work enough hours on average to receive benefits, employers must track their schedules for three to 12 months prior to 2014 — meaning many are restructuring payrolls now or will do so early next year.

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If Obama and the Democrats are re-elected in November, look for 25% unemployment because Atlas will have shrugged.

Mr. President the business of America is Business NOT Government

by Dick McDonald

I take President Obama’s latest slam against small business people personally.  I was a small business man for 30 years and during that time I did over 2,000 private placements to raise the capital to feed several million cattle. During that time the only obstacle I faced was government.  If it wasn’t SEC compliance, it was tax law concerns. If it wasn’t agricultural department red tape it was slaughter house regulations.

I conducted this business as a tennis shoe cowboy in Encino CA with the help of 2 or 3 clerical help.  To tell me I had to thank my lucky stars for government’s help is pure Marxian propaganda on the part of Obama.  Government restricted and limited my capabilities and opportunities at every turn. I won’t thank government I will fight it in the future to limit its powers.

With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd Frank legislation I couldn’t afford to do what I did for 30 years as it would cost me $200,000 to $400,000 for EACH private placement even before I attempted to get an investor.  No wonder start-ups have slowed and unemployment is sky rocketing; raising money for new ventures is limited to only the very wealthy who can afford the cost of these new regulations. Let’s face it, these regulations favor the very wealthy contrary to the BS Obama is selling the middle-class and poor people.

If Obama and the Democrats are re-elected in November, look for 25% unemployment because Atlas will have shrugged.

The chart that will get Obama fired

Henry Blodget over at Business Insider has the low down.

Remember Obama's campaign slogan "all fired up" ...

2012:  "FIRED"

Unemployment Rate Dropped In Every State That Elected A Republican Gov. In 2010

On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.

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The Spanish Domino

"We have at most a month before Spain drags down the entire EU..."

Things have gotten so bad that Spanish citizens are pulling their money out of Spain en masse: €65 billion left the Spanish banking system in March 2011 alone.

Spain Is About to Enter a Full-Scale Collapse

If Spain's crisis deepens Europe's recession, it could tip the entire world economy into a stubborn slump. The ramifications would be enormous, including: reduced odds of Barack Obama's re-election, assuming a weaker U.S. recovery; less political cohesion and more social unrest in Europe (even now, the European Union's unemployment rate is 10.2 percent); and growing pressures in many countries for economic nationalism and protectionism.

Spain is suffering a hangover from what economist Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute calls "the mother of all housing booms."

The Pain In Spain

The REAL unemployment rate

FORBES: Don't Be Fooled, The Obama Unemployment Rate Is 11%

HAT TIP: CITIZEN WELLS

"Who's On First?" (Obama style)

Remember the famous "Who's On First? routine by Abbott & Costello?

Well, here's a modern version (don't tell Obama--he doesn't tolerate anything that contradicts what he tells us):

There’s an old adage that numbers don’t lie, but if Abbott & Costello were alive today, it would sound something like this...

COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America.

ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?

ABBOTT: No, that's 17%

COSTELLO: You just said 9%.

ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.

ABBOTT: No, that's 17%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 17% unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 17%?

ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 17% are out of work.

COSTELLO: If you are out of work are you unemployed?

ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO: What point?

ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To who?

ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.

ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work... Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles, that would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?

ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 17%.

You don't want to read about 17% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO: That would be frightening

ABBOTT: Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means there are two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT: Two ways is correct. .

COSTELLO Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT: Correct.

COSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.

ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist.

COSTELLO: I don't even know what the hell I just said!

NBA IN DIRE STRAITS

Tens Of Millions Of American Families Are Living On The Edge Of Desperation – And The Economy Is About To Get A Whole Lot Worse

Back during the early 1930s, the flow of credit was greatly restricted and that was one of the primary causes of the Great Depression. Back in 2008, another massive credit crunch just about brought the financial world to its knees.

Well, now it is starting to happen again. . .

But instead of doing something to prepare for the coming economic crisis, members of the U.S. Congress are focused on stripping even more of our liberties and freedoms away from us.

As I wrote about yesterday, a new law (S. 1867) is being pushed through the U.S. Senate that is extremely frightening.

If this bill becomes a law, the United States of America would officially become part of the "battlefield" in the war on terror, and any American citizen could easily be flagged as a "potential terrorist".

Once identified as a "potential terrorist", the U.S. military would be able to arrest you, take you to a foreign prison and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything.

What in the world is happening to America?

READ MORE

CBO: Stimulus hurts economy in the long run

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy.

CBO said that while the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short run, the extra debt that the stimulus piled up “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.”

The analysis confirms what CBO predicted before the stimulus passed in February 2009, though the top-end decline of two tenths of a percent is actually deeper than the agency predicted back then.

All told, the stimulus did boost jobs and the economy in the short run, according to CBO’s models. At the peak of spending from July through September 2010 it sustained anywhere from 700,000 to 3.6 million, which lowered the unemployment rate by between four-tenths of a percent to 2 percent.

The Obama administration had promised 3.5 million jobs would be produced at the peak of spending.

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Important message from the National Inflation Association

The Truth About Obama's Jobs Bill

On Thursday evening, President Obama gave a speech to a joint session of Congress discussing the jobs situation here in America. The purpose of Obama's speech was to convince the American public and their elected representatives in Washington to support Obama's new $447 billion 'American Jobs Act', which has a cost that is 49% larger than the $300 billion act most people were expecting. NIA believes this bill will do nothing to reduce unemployment in America and that it is nothing but another stimulus bill in disguise that will add to our budget deficits.

Obama's bill proposes a $4,000 per employee tax credit for businesses that hire somebody who was previously unemployed for 6 months or more, at a cost of $8 billion. At the same time, Obama wants to extend emergency unemployment compensation (EUC), which allows Americans who have exhausted standard unemployment benefits that last for 26 weeks to continue receiving them for between 20 and 53 additional weeks. EUC benefits are set to expire at the end of 2011 and continuing them through the end of 2012 will cost U.S. taxpayers $49 billion.

It is totally absurd for Obama to give employers money to attempt to hire people he is simultaneously paying to stay out of work. What makes this even more outrageous is that employers have an incentive not to hire recently laid off workers, when only those unemployed for 6 months or more will bring them a $4,000 check. If this bill is passed it will make the unemployment situation in America far worse than it already is.

NIA has heard from members who own farms and have positions on their farms available, but can't find anybody interested in working for them and filling the available positions. Every time they hire somebody to work on their farm, the worker purposely does a poor job and tries to get fired. Their sole purpose of getting a job is to convince their local unemployment agency that they are trying to find employment so that they can keep receiving unemployment benefits, when in reality they are trying to take advantage of the system.

Obama is right that any future recovery will be driven by our businesses and our workers, but if Washington wants to make a positive difference the only step it should take to improve our people's lives, is get out of their lives. It is impossible for any piece of legislation including Obama's 'American Jobs Act', to improve the employment situation here in America. Obama needs to remove any government programs already in place that interfere with the free market. NIA believes that if the U.S. eliminated all unemployment benefits and also got rid of the minimum wage, it would cause the unemployment rate to return to healthy levels.

U.S. employees earning up to $106,800 annually currently pay a 4.2% payroll tax that is scheduled to revert back to 6.2% in 2012. Obama not only doesn't want employee payroll taxes to raise back up to the historical level of 6.2%, which went into effect in 1990, but he wants to further reduce them to 3.1% for 2012. The annual cost of this employee payroll tax reduction is estimated to be $175 billion. In an attempt to help small businesses, Obama also wants to cut employer side payroll taxes in half from 6.2% to 3.1% on the first $5 million of payroll, while eliminating employer side payroll taxes for new hires. The annual cost of this employer side payroll tax reduction is estimated to be $65 billion.

NIA believes all payroll taxes should be eliminated. Americans who make payroll tax payments today are paying for other Americans to receive entitlement programs that they will never receive. Social Security and Medicare are already on the verge of insolvency. By the end of this decade, NIA believes Americans receiving Social Security checks will be receiving checks that don't have any purchasing power and aren't worth cashing. Americans would be much better off if they were able to use the money they currently spend on payroll taxes to accumulate physical silver instead. Only Americans with enough savings in physical gold and silver will be able to retire in the future.

Obama's bill also provides $35 billion in state and local government aid, $50 billion in infrastructure repairs, $10 billion for a national infrastructure bank, $30 billion for school modernization and repairs, and $15 billion in housing expenditures. Unfortunately, the jobs Obama's bill will create for construction workers, teachers, veterans, and the long-term unemployed, are only temporary jobs that will vanish after the bill expires, and the money printed to pay these workers will steal from the purchasing power of American workers who already have jobs today. There is no doubt about it that America's infrastructure is decaying and we need to build new roads and bridges, but this is something that we can't afford to do until we return to an economy that is based on production instead of consumption.

We need to return to a trade surplus and begin paying off our debt before we can afford to make investments into infrastructure. China can afford to build newer airports and faster railroads because they have a $254 billion trade surplus and $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves that they are better off spending on infrastructure improvements than keeping parked in U.S. dollars that will soon be worthless.

Obama says that everything in his bill will be paid for, but NIA wonders how? The government is claiming this isn't another stimulus bill and Obama didn't mention the word stimulus once during his speech. The truth is, NIA believes all of the measures in this bill will have to be paid for by borrowing and printing money, which will increase our budget deficit, expand the money supply, and lead to massive price inflation.

The jolt that Obama is trying to give to the economy he admits has stalled, is the same economy he tried to jolt with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which put the U.S. $787 billion deeper into debt. NIA said at the time this stimulus bill was passed that when it failed to produce the results the government said it would, instead of admitting that stimulating the economy failed and reversing course, they will say the stimulus didn't work because it wasn't big enough and attempt to pass further stimulus bills by making new false promises.

Obama is lying to the public just like Congress recently did in regards to its bill to raise the debt ceiling. Congress deceived Americans into believing that in return for raising the debt ceiling so that the government can continue operating as it is today, "spending cuts" would be made to lower future budget deficits. These so called "spending cuts" turned out to be minor reductions to very large spending increases, with even these minor reductions not beginning until early 2013. Government spending is set to rise every single year until the dollar doesn't have any purchasing power left.

Obama said in his speech last night that, "while corporate profits have come roaring back, smaller companies haven't." The reason this is true is only the largest banks and the companies they do business with have direct access to the Federal Reserve's cheap and easy money. If the Fed didn't bail out all of the banks on Wall Street that made risky leveraged up bets with other people's money for the sole purpose of paying their employees huge bonuses, smaller banks would have acquired their assets in bankruptcy court for pennies on the dollar and be prospering today. Instead, small banks that made sound decisions were punished for doing the right thing. The Fed has made it even more difficult than ever for them to compete with the large banks that should be out of business.

If the Fed and Treasury didn't bail out Wall Street, the world wouldn't have come to an end like former-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson conned everybody into believing. The truth is, we would be better off today because the bad assets would have been liquidated. The bad assets that caused the financial crisis of late-2008/early-2009 still exist today. The main difference between back then and now is, the size of the Fed's balance sheet has doubled to $2.862 trillion due to the toxic assets they purchased, and the world is now flooded with excess liquidity of U.S. dollars.

It is impossible for the U.S. not to feel the consequences of the money we squandered fighting wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and maintaining military bases all around the world. It is impossible for the U.S. not to feel the devastating effects of interest rates that have been left artificially low for way too long. When you have an artificial boom, that boom will eventually go bust and the more that is done to prop a phony economy up that is built on U.S. consumers spending money they don't have, the harder the economy will fall in terms of high unemployment, high inflation, and a total lack of purchasing power that will cause a permanent decline in the U.S. standard of living.

The fact that Obama felt the need to demand that Congress pass his bill 17 times in 1 speech, shows that nothing positive will come out of this bill for the average American citizen.  The only people who will benefit from this bill are bankers on Wall Street who are in line to earn huge fees on the infrastructure deals that get funded by the new national infrastructure bank. While the official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment rate in August was 9.1%, down from its peak in October of 2009 of 10.1%, the real rate of unemployment including both short and long-term discouraged workers is now 22.8%, up from 22% in October of 2009 and a new high since the Great Depression in 1933. By further impeding the free market, Obama's bill will further misallocate what little resources Americans still have left before hyperinflation arrives.

It is important to spread the word about NIA to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, if you want America to survive hyperinflation. Please tell everybody you know to become members of NIA for free immediately at: http://inflation.us

Chronic unemployment is now worse than during the Great Depression!

“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?”

So now we have high unemployment and high inflation

Oh goody! All of this stagflation is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the 1970s.

Right now, more Americans than at any other point since World War II are flat broke and have lost hope...

Broke! 10 Facts About The Financial Condition Of American Families That Will Blow Your Mind

We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression

U.S. News & World Report: Why the Jobs Situation Is Worse Than It Looks

CHART: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

From Rene Guerra: Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey debunks the flat-out lie that the entire second GW Bush administration was in recession, when the latter was ignited by the great subprime (i.e., NINJA= No Income No Job No Assets required) home-loan mortgage meltdown:

Are you better off or worse off than you were two years ago?

This really caught my eye because I was at my local discount health food store visiting my acupuncturist (for a very bad cold that just won't go away) and overheard two women talking about how THIS YEAR was worse than last year no matter what the politicians keep trying to tell us!

More than 50 percent of Americans say they are worse off now than they were two years ago when President Barack Obama took office, and two-thirds believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, a Bloomberg National Poll shows.

The survey, conducted Dec. 4-7, finds that 51 percent of respondents think their situation has deteriorated, compared with 35 percent who say they’re doing better. The balance isn’t sure. Americans have grown more downbeat about the country’s future in just the last couple of months, the poll shows. The pessimism cuts across political parties and age groups, and is common to both sexes.

The negative sentiment may cast a pall over the holiday shopping season, according to the poll. A plurality of those surveyed -- 46 percent -- expects to spend less this year than last; only 12 percent anticipate spending more. Holiday sales rose by just under a half percent last year after falling by almost 4 percent in 2008.

“It’s definitely different this year than it’s been,” says poll respondent Larry Deyo, a 38-year-old father of two in Marlton, New Jersey. “I can’t really do too much with spending.” He says he lost his job at a kitchen and bath design center when the company closed, and he’s now working at a Home Depot Inc. store with a “significant decrease” in pay.

It was President Ronald Reagan who popularized the question, “Are you better off or worse off than you were four years ago” in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter.

Most Americans Say They're Worse Off Since Obama Took Office, Poll Shows