Obama: ‘Economy Would Be Much Better Off’ With More Government Workers

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama – citing the job losses since he took office -- said “the economy would be much better off,” unemployment would be 6.5 percent and the national deficit would be in decline if there were more federal, state and local government workers.

“If those layoffs had not happened, if public sector employees grew like they did in the past two recessions, the unemployment rate would be 6.5 instead of 7.5,” Obama said. “Our economy would be much better off, and the deficit would still be going down because we would be getting more tax revenue.”

Obama spoke Tuesday at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he promoted plans he said would help the middle class such as corporate tax reform, increased federal spending on infrastructure, more education spending, public-private partnerships and rolling back the sequester.

“Instead of using a scalpel to get rid of programs we don’t need and keep vital investments that we do, the same group has kept in place this meat cleaver called the sequester that is just slashing all kinds of investments in education and research and our military,” Obama said.

“Yet all the things that are needed to make this country a magnet for good middle class jobs, those things are being cut. These moves don’t just hurt our economy in the long term. They hurt our middle class right now,” he added.

Via: CNS News

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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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