Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Paychecks

"The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending." - Mort Zuckerman, editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

What a novel concept? No more asset bubbles to borrow from the future against. It's paycheck time and I think that's really good for the long term future of the United States.

This is a great editorial. Another part I liked was when Zuckerman discussed the phantom jobs the government often adds to the Employment Report.

"- June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse."

It's based on what they call the "birth/death" model, where the goverment basically adds or subtracts jobs that don't exist based on where they think we are in the business cycle. Lately, the birth/death model has been adding about 200k jobs a month, greatly minimizing the Unemployment problem we have in the country. Just another statistical trick thought up by a government agency that makes real problems harder to recognize.