No Work, No Homes
by Bob Herbert

After the meeting, Mr. Bush said, "This administration is optimistic about job creation."

It's too bad George Akerlof wasn't at the meeting. Mr. Akerlof, a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, bluntly declared on Tuesday that "the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in the last 200 years." Speaking at a press conference arranged by the Economic Policy Institute, Mr. Akerlof, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said, "Within 10 years, we're going to pay a serious price for such irresponsibility."

Also participating in the institute's press conference was Robert Solow, an economist and professor emeritus at M.I.T. who is also a Nobel laureate. He assailed the Bush tax cuts as "redistributive in intent and redistributive in effect."

"There has been a dissipation of the huge budget surplus," he said, "and all we have to show for that is the city of Baghdad."

The president and his advisers could have learned something about the real world if, instead of hanging out at the ranch, they had visited a city like Los Angeles (or almost any other hard-hit American venue) and spent time talking to folks who have been thrown out of work and, in some cases, out of their homes in this treacherous Bush economy.
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Homelessness grows as more live check-to-check

Homelessness in major cities is escalating as more laid-off workers already living paycheck-to-paycheck wind up on the streets or in shelters.

As Americans file for bankruptcy in record numbers and credit card debt explodes, more workers are a paycheck away from losing their homes. Now the frail economy is pushing them over the edge. With 9 million unemployed workers in July, the face of homelessness is changing to include more families shaken by joblessness.
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Twilight Zone Economics
by Paul Krugman

For about 20 months the U.S. economy has been operating in a twilight zone: growing too fast to meet the classic definition of a recession, but too slowly to meet the usual criteria for economic recovery. There's nothing particularly mysterious about our situation. But recent news coverage and commentary — in particular, the enthusiastic headlines that followed a modest increase in growth and a modest decline in jobless claims — suggest that some people still don't get it. So here's a brief refresher course on twilight zone Economics 101.

Since November 2001 — which the National Bureau of Economic Research, in a controversial decision, has declared the end of the recession — the U.S. economy has grown at an annual rate of about 2.6 percent. That may not sound so bad, but when it comes to jobs there has been no recovery at all. Nonfarm payrolls have fallen by, on average, 50,000 per month since the "recovery" began, accounting for 1 million of the 2.7 million jobs lost since March 2001.

Meanwhile, employment is chasing a moving target because the working-age population continues to grow. Just to keep up with population growth, the U.S. needs to add about 110,000 jobs per month. When it falls short of that, jobs become steadily harder to find. At this point conditions in the labor market are probably the worst they have been for almost 20 years. (The measured unemployment rate isn't all that high, but that's largely because many people have given up looking for work.)

All this leads to a great deal of suffering — not just lost income, but also the anxiety and humiliation that come with long-term unemployment. Is relief in sight?
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Leading economic indicators in Hollywood

A few days ago I visited a client in Hollywood at 5 pm. I noticed dozens of homeless people, mostly in their teens and twenties, nearby on the sidewalks. I asked the owner about this.

She said "There's a food kitchen down the block that feeds them at 6 pm, so they start lining up early. There's twice as many as there were just a few months ago. Which shows that the economy is getting worse".

Rescue missions are reporting they now sometimes feed and shelter people who used to volunteer for them.

Last night I drove through Bel Air, the wealthiest section of L.A., through the narrow twisty streets designed to confuse those who don't live there, on the streets with No Parking signs everywhere. That's right, you can't park on the streets in this residential area. Nor, in the truly expensive areas, can you see anything but high walls surrounding the estates, for block after block.

Not a person in sight. Just masses of walled estates, delivering a clear subliminal message of, If you don't live here, go away.

Prices of these estates start at 8 figures, and people are buying them. Who are they? Why must they protect themselves behind fortresses?

Hungry Hollywood street kids and people who buy 20 million dollar mansions so they can tear them down and build a bigger one - within a few miles of each other.

Feels like a third world country, doesn't it?
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For Bush, Loss of Jobs May Erode Support in South Carolina

No shit!