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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent last  month, its lowest level in 19 months. That was because more people found jobs,  but also because some people gave up on their job searches.

The Labor Department says employers added 103,000 jobs in December, an  improvement from November's revised total of 71,000 but far below most analysts'  expectations.

Mankiw says more taxes would  just mean he'd work less.

In an example he gave he  showed why:

If he was offered $1,000 to  write an article - without taxes at all - he would get a $1,000. And if he  invested it at 8% interest he would end up with $10,000 in 30 years.

But then again, that world  doesn't exist.

In reality, if the tax cuts  expire, he would pay more than 39% in taxes, nearly 4% in Medicare tax thanks to  Obamacare and more than 5% in state income taxes which equals $523.

As far as investing it, the  corporation whose stock he chose would have to pay 35% tax, so he would only  make a little more than 5%. So over 10 years that money would only grow to about  $1,700.

But wait there's more!

 

Economics Doomsday Clocks: Are We Heading for Another Great  Depression?

 

• Posted on October 5, 2010 at 11:46am by Jonathon M. Seidl  
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Is America heading toward another Great Depression? The  answer may not be a definite “yes” or “no,“ but rather an eerie ”maybe.”

 

I  

n yesterday’s  Wall Street Journal, Donald Luskin   laid out    an argument for why,  should we continue on our path,   America might be poised to  repeat the mistakes it made that lead up to and   perpetuated the Great  Depression. In other words, if history is a great teacher,   we could be its worst  students. 

 

What may allow the “history repeats itself” cliche to ring true, he says, is  the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and a renewed aggression toward trade  via a recent amendment to the Smoot-Hawley Act — a union favor: both “doomsday  clocks” with a deafening tick-tock, tick-tock.

 

First, where we find ourselves. Explaining a chart showing the stock market  in the early part of the century and now (seen above), Luskin paints a  fork-in-the-road picture:

 

 

  

“This week  corresponds on the chart to mid-August 1937, when the cumulative   effects of  massive hikes in personal and corporate tax rates, severe monetary    tightening, and aggressive business-bashing by  the Roosevelt administration   tipped the  economy into the ‘depression inside the Depression.’” 

 

We are at that tipping point. And while “we’re not repeating all the mistakes  of 1937,” Luskin says, the impending tax increases and trade act are bad  enough.

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

 Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

 We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Unemployment rose in most cities and counties in December, signaling that companies remain reluctant to hire even as the economy recovers.

 The unemployment rate rose in 306 of 372 metro areas, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The rate fell in 41 and was unchanged in 25. That's worse than November, when the rate fell in 170 areas, rose in only 154 and was unchanged in 48.

The Big Lie is that Obama knows this and yet deliberately uses phony numbers and rhetoric to pass a bill that may itself cause a depression.

Change we can believe in?