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• Defending Rand Paul
• Hillary Clinton Says She Intends To Remain Secretary Of State
• Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli Talks About ObamaCare Lawsuits
• Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli Talks About ObamaCare Lawsuits
• So This Is How Liberty Dies, To Thunderous Applause

• Peter Schiff: Americans Must Prepare For More Difficult Times To Come
• Peter Schiff: Americans Must Prepare For More Difficult Times To Come
• A Fitting Epitaph
• A Fitting Epitaph
• Vast Majority Of Americans Think Country Still In Recession

The American economy added an unexpected strong 290,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent, the government said Friday.

Analysts had expected a gain of about 190,000 in the month.

With revisions on Friday, April was the fourth consecutive month that the economy added workers (a revised 230,000 jobs were added in March instead of 162,000), the job market still has a long way to go before it can be counted on to provide a base for a sustained economic recovery. More than 15.3 million were unemployed last month.

Besides March, February was revised from a loss of 14,000 jobs to a gain of 39,000. With a January gain of 14,000, the cumulative increase came to 573,000 jobs in four months.

Private employers added 231,000 jobs in April. The federal government added jobs last month, including 66,000 temporary positions for the 2010 Census.

“The economy is turning; unfortunately it is not improving as much as one would hope given the downturn,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak and Company. “As companies come out of the downturn they are going to be somewhat reluctant to at least immediately increase their work force.”

As a result, more than 9.2 million still relied on part-time employment in April.

“We are looking at jobs growth in the vicinity of 150,000 to 175,000 per month going forward,” Peter Cardillo, chief market economist for Avalon Partners said. “That means the unemployment rate is going to stay on high level ground for a while.”

Friday’s jobless data was the latest to contribute to a picture of a slowly improving economy, and analysts hoped the employment numbers would help to fuel the momentum of upturns in business confidence.

The Obama Administration will tout this as good news, and it is, but we’re going to need a lot more months with much higher job growth than this for things to really be back on track,

• Obama’s Potemkin Recovery
• March Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%, 162,000 Jobs Added
• March Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%, 162,000 Jobs Added
• Unemployment Rate Dips Slightly To 9.4%
• Unemployment Rate Dips Slightly To 9.4%

And, Peter Schiff, one of the only economists to see the 2008 crash before it happened, said that the United States is on a collision course with disaster:

Given how accurate he’s been so far, Schiff’s warnings bear listening to.

• Meanwhile, Over In Europe, We’ve Got Economic Chaos
• Ron Paul And Peter Schiff On Obama’s Economic Plans
• Ron Paul And Peter Schiff On Obama’s Economic Plans
• Republican Liberty Caucus Endorses Rand Paul And Peter Schiff
• Republican Liberty Caucus Endorses Rand Paul And Peter Schiff

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The recovery is picking up steam as employers boost payrolls, but economists think the government’s stimulus package and jobs bill had little to do with the rebound, according to a survey released Monday.

In latest quarterly survey by the National Association for Business Economics, the index that measures employment showed job growth for the first time in two years — but a majority of respondents felt the fiscal stimulus had no impact.

NABE conducted the study by polling 68 of its members who work in economic roles at private-sector firms. About 73% of those surveyed said employment at their company is neither higher nor lower as a result of the $787 billion Recovery Act, which the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers says is on track to create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of the year.

That sentiment is shared for the recently passed $17.7 billion jobs bill that calls for tax breaks for businesses that hire and additional infrastructure spending. More than two-thirds of those polled believe the measure won’t affect payrolls, while 30% expect it to boost hiring “moderately.”

Even if it’s true, this honestly won’t matter politically.

If there are signs that the economy is improving then that will inure to the benefit of President Obama and the Democrats, although it may not happen in time for the 2010 Elections unless there is significant improvement in the unemployment rate between now and then.

• Unemployment Rate Dips Slightly To 9.4%
• Unemployment Rate Dips Slightly To 9.4%
• Time To Party Like It’s 1983
• Time To Party Like It’s 1983
• Barack Obama’s Phantom Jobs

• Barney Frank: Vote On “Audit The Fed” Bill By October
• Barney Frank: Vote On “Audit The Fed” Bill By October
• Bernanke: Recession Is “Very Likely” Over
• Bernanke: Recession Is “Very Likely” Over
• Peter Schiff Talks About Bernanke’s Reappointment

WASHINGTON (AP) — A panel of academics that date the beginnings and ends of recessions isn’t ready to declare just yet when this downturn ended.

The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that although most barometers show improvements in the economy, it would be “premature” to pinpoint the end of a recession based on economic data seen so far.

That assessment came after the group of academic economists met at its Cambridge, Mass., headquarters on Thursday to review mountains of economic data.

The panel looks at figures that make up the nation’s gross domestic product, which measures the total value of goods and services produced within the United States. It also reviews incomes, employment and industrial activity.

The economists decided that many of the key economic indicators are “quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months,” NBER said. The government often changes its estimates of economic growth, job creation and other important barometers based on more complete information. The panel of academic economists was wary of making a declaration about the end of the recession when key government figures could still be changed.

Even if we are out of the recession itself, though, don’t expect an economic boom anytime soon:

WASHINGTON – The pillars of Americans’ financial security — jobs and home values — will stay shaky well into 2011, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists.

The findings of the new AP Economy Survey, released Monday, point to an economic recovery that will move slowly and fitfully this year and next. As a result, the Federal Reserve will be forced to keep interest rates near zero until at least the final quarter of this year, three-fourths of the economists said.

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• The unemployment rate will stay stubbornly high the next two years. It will inch down to 9.3 percent by the end of this year and to 8.4 percent by the end of 2011. The rate has been 9.7 percent since January. When the recession started in December 2007, unemployment was 5 percent.

• Home prices will remain almost flat for the next two years, even after plunging an average 30 percent nationally since their peak in 2006. The economists forecast no rise this year and a 2.3 percent gain next year.

• The economy will grow 3 percent this year, which is less than usual during the early phase of a recovery and the reason unemployment will stay high. It takes growth of 5 percent for a year to lower the jobless rate by 1 percentage point, economists say.

And as if that weren’t enough to depress you, it’s entirely possible that a signficant portion of the unemployed will never fully recover from the recession:

WASHINGTON — Despite recent job gains, one grim statistic casts a long shadow over the recovering economy and the futures of more than 6 million workers: Fully 44 percent of the nation’s 15 million unemployed have been out of work for more than six months.

And evidence suggests many of them may never rebuild their working lives completely.

Never since the Great Depression has the U.S. labor market seen anything like it. The previous high in long-term unemployment was 26 percent in June 1983, just after the deep downturn of the early ’80s. The 44 percent rate this year translates into more than 6.5 million people.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of these workers actually have been jobless for a year or longer, new Labor Department reports show.

Add into all of this the negative economic impacts that will be felt from growing government debt and rising interest rates, it’s beginning to look like we will be living with the impact of the Great Recession for some time to come.

• Unemployment Rate Drops In November
• Unemployment Rate Drops In November
• March Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%, 162,000 Jobs Added
• March Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%, 162,000 Jobs Added
• Unemployment Rate Dips Slightly To 9.4%

WASHINGTON — Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions of Americans, but for nearly half of U.S. households, it’s simply somebody else’s problem.

About 47% will pay no federal income taxes for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

(…)

In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that these households won’t be paying taxes of some kind:

In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

So, you’re still paying some taxes somewhere no matter what this report might say. However, it seems to me that there’s something just a little off about an income tax system where nearly half of taxpayers aren’t really taxpayers at all.

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Well, it looks like it’s coming:

By the end of 2010, about half of all commercial real estate mortgages will be underwater, said Elizabeth Warren, chairperson of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, in a wide-ranging interview on Monday.

“They are [mostly] concentrated in the mid-sized banks,” Warren told CNBC. “We now have 2,988 banks—mostly midsized, that have these dangerous concentrations in commercial real estate lending.”

As a result, the economy will face another “very serious problem” that will have to be resolved over the next three years, she said, adding that things are unlikely to return to normalcy in 2010.

You can see the evidence all over, even here in Northern Virginia, which has survived the “Great Recession” in pretty good shape so far. Half empty strip malls and office buildings. Commercial developments that were supposed to be open in the Spring of 2009 where there hasn’t even been a single shovel full of dirt moved. All those properties have mortgages that must be paid, regardless of whether the tenants are there.

If this happens as some predict, it will pretty much wipe out whatever economic recovery we’re experiencing right now.

• The Next Real Estate Crisis
• The Next Real Estate Crisis
• FDIC Fund Declined 20% In Second Quarter
• FDIC Fund Declined 20% In Second Quarter
• One Step Further Along The Road To Serfdom

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it’s tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday.

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be their unemployment insurance, for up to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to make no payments at all.

The new push, which the White House is scheduled to announce Friday, takes direct aim at the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans that went bad, more recent defaults reflect the country’s economic downturn and the inability of jobless borrowers to keep paying.

The administration’s newest push also seek to more aggressively help borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, by encouraging lenders to cut the loan balances of millions of these distressed homeowners and possibly refinance into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. The problem of so-called “underwater” borrowers has bedeviled earlier administration efforts to address the mortgage crisis as home prices plunged.

Once again, I ask what provision in The Constitution authorizes the President to do this, and by what right do they purport to intervene and rewrite the terms of a private contract ?

But, that was a question more appropriate for an America where the Constitution and the Rule of Law actually meant something.

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