UNEMPLOYMENT RATES RISE IN 90% OF US CITIES

Unemployment rates rose in nearly all large U.S. cities in June as college graduates and many of those still in school began searching for jobs.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose in 347 large metro areas in June compared with the previous month. They fell in 12 and were unchanged in 13. In May, rates fell in 109 cities and rose in 243.

Unlike the national figures, the metro unemployment data are not adjusted for such seasonal changes. Many of the cities with significant rate increases have large universities where students graduated in June and began looking for work. And many university workers are temporarily unemployed in the summer when the academic year ends.

Nationally, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent in June, down from 8.2 percent a year ago. Employers added 195,000 jobs last month. That's close to average monthly gain in the first half of this year of 202,000. Hiring averaged only 180,000 a month in the previous six months.

The city with the nation's lowest unemployment rate was Bismarck, N.D, where the rate was 2.8 percent.
Yuma, Ariz., reported the highest rate at 31.8 percent. Yuma has a heavy population of migrant farm workers.

Among the 49 cities with more than 1 million in population, Detroit had the highest unemployment rate at 10.3 percent. That's up from 9 percent in May.

The unemployment rate in Minneapolis was 5.1 percent, the lowest among the large cities.

Via: Breitbart

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Ashamed of Patriotism

The 9/11 museum director’s revulsion at patriotism is part of a larger collapse in national confidence. 

History shows that great and dominant societies can survive a great number of awful things without succumbing to collapse, but that they rarely outlast the gradual disintegration of national self-confidence. With this in mind, consider the words of one Michael Shulan, who “really believes” that “the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently.” Mr. Shulan, who is the creative director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, also expressed his distaste at what he called the “rah-rah America” instinct.

The news that a New York City–based “creative director” is disheartened by muscular American self-assuredness will presumably not come as a hefty surprise to many. Nevertheless, I might venture that if one’s sole job is to memorialize for the nation the revolting attack that unrepentant barbarians perpetrated on the United States on September 11 of 2001, one’s calculations as to what level of patriotism is and isn't seemly should change a touch.

And yet they haven’t. In Elizabeth Greenspan’s new book about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center,Battle for Ground Zero, the author relates a disquieting incident in which Shulan huffily objects to a photograph of three ash-covered firefighters raising an American flag amid the mangled remains of the World Trade Center. Per Greenspan’s account, Shulan’s displeasure was mollified only after he and his colleagues reached a “compromise” and a couple of other photographs of the flag were added to the museum’s collection. “Shulan didn’t like three photographs more than he liked one, but he went along with it,” Greenspan reports.

The job of a curator is to curate, and nobody would expect Mr. Shulan to remain quiet if he had legitimate artistic differences. But the interesting question here is whyMr. Shulan — or anyone, for that matter — would find distasteful or “simplistic” the inclusion of photographs of American firefighters responding to mass murder in an exhibition that venerates the very same.

Via: National Review Online

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Obama’s New “Grand Bargain” Is Another Tax Increase

President Obama gave his second in series of summer speeches on the economy today. Like his first speech last week, he recycled several old policies that he’s trotted out before. The only new policy of note was another attempt at a so-called “grand bargain.”

The President’s latest iteration of a bargain centers on reforming the corporate tax code. So far, so good. His willingness to fix the corporate tax system is good and welcome news. TheU.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and we are one of only a few countries that tax their businesses on the income they earn in other countries. Our uncompetitive system is destroying jobs and lowering wages for American workers. It is long overdue for reform.

The central purpose of tax reform is to invigorate economic growth. It does that by broadening the tax base (closing “loopholes”) and subsequently lowering tax rates to increase incentives for economic growth. Reform should lower rates enough so it is revenue neutral, meaning it does not raise tax revenue. If corporate tax reform followed this formula, the economy would get a tremendous boost.

It is on the revenue neutrality requirement that President Obama’s bargain falls apart. Rather than use all the revenue that would come from closing loopholes to lower rates, he’d use some of that resulting revenue to increase spending. As a result, his plan would actually be yet another tax hike first; tax reform would come second. And the tax hike would blunt the positive growth effect that tax reform would create.

Via: The Foundry

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The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers?

Reagan, Thatcher and the real battle behind defunding Obamacare.

“We had rabbits when we needed tigers.” — Ronald Reagan writing in his diary of congressional Republicans

Well.

There they go again.

The GOP Establishment is terrified at the idea of defunding Obamacare.

Except, of course, that the opposition within the GOP Establishment and among some conservative pundits to defunding Obamacare — as Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio propose — has nothing whatsoever to do with Obamacare.

Zero.

As Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would both recognize instantly. 

Leading to the obvious. The problem within the GOP is just as Reagan described decades ago: too many rabbits, not enough tigers.

First: Reagan and Thatcher. We’ll get to the critics after that.

Reagan, right from the very beginning of his active political career in 1964 all the way through his two terms in the White House, saw the party’s problem as the timid, barnacle-encrusted GOP Establishment. An Establishment he called the “fraternal order” Republicans, as he told the New York Times in December of 1976 when the GOP was reeling from what Reagan saw as yet another unnecessary GOP presidential loss by faint-hearted party moderates, this one to Jimmy Carter by Gerald Ford.

Via: The American Spectator

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Mark Levin on Cavuto Torches GOP, Gov Christie and Obama on Scandals

The Great One called into Cavuto to address few issues today from Darth Hussein’s “phony scandals” charge, the lack of action from GOP to the NSA.

Levin said there should be a special investigative committee on the scandals that we don’t need this committee and that committee tripping over themselves. Will it ever happen when you have Boehner and the GOP flopping around don’t hold your breath because there is no political gain in their eyes. Will we ever have anyone held responsible for the abuses by the IRS? I’m not holding my breath and the same goes for Benghazi. I think we all can agree with Mark on where Obama was 9/11/12. He doesn’t want anyone to know he went sleep while he let 4 Americans die, who called for help 3 times. IMO the progressives in the GOP as well as the regime is just running the clock out on all the scandals.

Via: Saving the Republic

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