Suppose you got a letter from your state government telling you that property taxes were going to be going up, but they couldn't tell you by how much. After you crumpled the paper in your shaking fist, your mind would probably start racing -as you tried to decide whether to reach for the bicarb, the bourbon, or both - with questions like, "What was last year's rate again? How much more will I be paying for the house now? What are the two cars in the driveway going to cost us?" You'd then start doing a mental tallying of your expenses and probably conclude that you wanted to hold off on any new purchases or expenses, and any thought of replacing the older car with a newer one would probably be shelved for the time being since you didn't want to deal with higher taxes on top of new monthly payments.
Welcome to every business's current nightmare.
Over the past 14 months, the federal government has approved two enormously complex legislative packages in the form of healthcare and financial reform, each with thousands and thousands of pages of new requirements that no one fully understands or has yet had sufficient time to analyze. Consequently, many companies have understandably put any major hiring plans on hold until they can figure out what the likely costs of these new laws will be. Assuming they will face higher insurance and compliance costs - something that seems all but inevitable given what we're reading in the papers every day - they're going to be less likely to hire more employees or make new investments.
In other words, the unemployment numbers we're currently seeing are likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.
It gets worse. According to the Wall Street Journal, the actual numbers of unemployed workers is significantly higher than official estimates when discouraged workers (i.e., those unemployed but who have given up looking after getting too many thumbs-down) are factored into the mix. Since the official rate - 9.7% as of this writing - only includes people looking and filing for unemployment, it doesn't reflect the actual number of people who are out of work. When these "I give ups" are included, the number is more like fifteen percent or seventeen percent.
That's one out of every six workers.
Just some food for thought as we head into the next legislative session with a (checks Washington Post online) $1.4 trillion deficit and still higher taxes on the way. Methinks we'll be looking at extending unemployment benefits a lot longer than 99 weeks.
By the way, want some perspective? Think of a trillion this way: If we simply measure time in seconds, we need to go back over thirty one thousand years to reach one trillion seconds. That's before the earliest known permanent human settlement and about the same age as the oldest cave paintings known to archaeologists.
Welcome to every business's current nightmare.
Over the past 14 months, the federal government has approved two enormously complex legislative packages in the form of healthcare and financial reform, each with thousands and thousands of pages of new requirements that no one fully understands or has yet had sufficient time to analyze. Consequently, many companies have understandably put any major hiring plans on hold until they can figure out what the likely costs of these new laws will be. Assuming they will face higher insurance and compliance costs - something that seems all but inevitable given what we're reading in the papers every day - they're going to be less likely to hire more employees or make new investments.
In other words, the unemployment numbers we're currently seeing are likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.
It gets worse. According to the Wall Street Journal, the actual numbers of unemployed workers is significantly higher than official estimates when discouraged workers (i.e., those unemployed but who have given up looking after getting too many thumbs-down) are factored into the mix. Since the official rate - 9.7% as of this writing - only includes people looking and filing for unemployment, it doesn't reflect the actual number of people who are out of work. When these "I give ups" are included, the number is more like fifteen percent or seventeen percent.
That's one out of every six workers.
Just some food for thought as we head into the next legislative session with a (checks Washington Post online) $1.4 trillion deficit and still higher taxes on the way. Methinks we'll be looking at extending unemployment benefits a lot longer than 99 weeks.
By the way, want some perspective? Think of a trillion this way: If we simply measure time in seconds, we need to go back over thirty one thousand years to reach one trillion seconds. That's before the earliest known permanent human settlement and about the same age as the oldest cave paintings known to archaeologists.
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