Another Republican President, Another Recession.

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/16/government-underestimated-job-growth/
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The government sharply underestimated job gains for most of 2021, including four months this summer in which it missed more job growth than at any other time on record.

In the most recent four months with revisions, June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported it underestimated job growth by a cumulative 626,000 jobs — that’s the largest underestimate of any other comparable period, going back to 1979. If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they’d be an absolute blockbuster.

In an average month before the pandemic, estimates would be revised by a little over 30,000 jobs, or just 0.02 percent of all the jobs in the United States. The recent revisions to the jobs reports have been much larger.

The missing jobs surfaced through revisions to the widely watched non-farm payrolls number that BLS releases each month. The data is considered preliminary until it has been revised twice. The fixes are typically minor, but recent revisions have been big enough to turn a substantial slump into a surprising surge.

These waves of revisions in the same direction tend to happen at turning points in the labor market. BLS relies on highly technical models to adjust for seasonal patterns, business closures and other factors, to catch new trends in the labor market and make revisions quickly.

It’s happened before during this pandemic. Revisions in the already calamitous months of March and April 2020 found the economy had lost 922,000 more jobs than initially reported. Also, earlier in the pandemic, BLS drew criticism for a misclassification error in a different survey, which BLS economists said greatly understated the unemployment rate. Due to the way certain survey questions were interpreted, millions of workers who said they had a job but couldn’t work due to coronavirus shutdowns were marked as absent rather than as temporarily unemployed.

A ‘misclassification error’ made the May unemployment rate look better than it is. Here’s what happened.

This time, the payrolls data has been obfuscated as businesses have been slow to respond to government surveys amid the chaos of the pandemic — part of a larger pattern in which the deadly virus has wreaked havoc on federal statistics.

Angie Clinton, the BLS section chief who oversees the payroll number crunching, said there have been more large revisions since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but that revisions are a sign of the system working as intended.

“We’re just improving the estimate using everything we know up through the month we’re releasing, really,” Clinton said. “I mean, it sounds counterintuitive to most people because revisions — they think, ‘Oh, they got it wrong the first time.’ But no, we got it right, based on what the sample told us. But going forward we receive more sample, some corrected records, and recalculate seasonal factors, which together may indicate a different story.”

The revisions have recast the narrative of a summer slowdown. In August, when economists expected a strong follow-up to the 943,000 jobs the economy added in July, the BLS announced the U.S. added only 235,000 jobs. Headlines dubbed it a “colossal miss” as job growth took a “giant step back.” Two months later, revisions based on additional data showed August jobs grew by 483,000, more than double the anemic original reading. It was the biggest positive revision in almost four decades.

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President Biden may have even paid a political price for the lackluster jobs numbers. From April to June, polls found that most Americans (51 percent) approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to an average of polls from Fox, NBC, Quinnipiac and The Post. But as bad economic numbers came out and the national political climate turned south, those numbers fell steadily — in October, just 39 percent approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, while 57 percent disapproved.

“Naysayers and detractors from Biden’s agenda are going to exploit any ‘bad’ economic indicator they can as evidence for why Biden has it wrong on the economy or why Biden’s Build Back Better proposal gets it wrong on the economy, and in that sense underestimates of the jobs numbers are not helpful,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative.

However, Biden’s falling economic-approval numbers during that period could also be attributed to other issues, such as rising inflation and the controversial and abrupt Afghanistan withdrawal, which have dragged Biden’s approval down across the board, Owens said. In that environment, a few slow jobs reports may not been the primary driver of public opinion, Owens said.

Each month’s revisions simply reflect economists’ new best estimate, based on additional data. For example, when businesses report a surprisingly good month, such as this October, the seasonal adjustment algorithms look back on previous months with the benefit of hindsight. A good October likely didn’t come out of nowhere: the August and September estimates probably missed some growth. So, some of the jump in October is assumed to have occurred earlier, and a portion of the October gains are reallocated back to previous months.

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These best-guess first estimates are often refined as responses straggle in from more of the 697,000 establishments surveyed each month, including major employers, government agencies and a rotating cast of small businesses. The businesses are asked how many people they employ, how much those people are paid excluding bonuses, and how many hours those are paid for.

In a typical recent month, about a quarter of the responses have come in late. When businesses don’t respond, economists and their models must account for all the reasons a business might not return a survey, including the possibility that it may have suddenly closed up shop. They must also account for newly formed businesses that won’t be on their survey rolls quite yet.

Jane Oates, the president of the employment-focused nonprofit WorkingNation and a Labor Department official in the aftermath of the Great Recession, said the coronavirus crisis and subsequent worker shortage put many employers under amazing stress. One plausible explanation for the Labor Department’s chronic underestimates is that the employers who were hiring the most were too busy to respond to the survey, so initial responses missed the fastest-hiring firms.

“Back in the Great Recession, there were many employers who were impacted but now every employer is impacted. Everybody is scrambling for talent. And I bet there’s just a higher percentage of them missing the deadline,” Oates said.

Before the pandemic, about 60 percent of contacted businesses responded to the survey, BLS data show.
By May 2021, the most recent month for which data is available, that had declined to 49 percent. Those low response rates may have played a role in the unusually high revisions seen during the past two years.

Rather than showing that BLS has failed, the revisions are a tribute to the agency’s commitment to getting the numbers right, said Cornell University economist Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017.

“They take their responsibilities very seriously,” Groshen said. “They’re very transparent about their methodology and they’re always trying to improve that.”

BLS is a professional civil-service agency. The only political appointee, the commissioner, has no access to numbers before they are finalized. The economists and statisticians entrusted with the jobs numbers work with almost fanatic secrecy, Groshen said.

When staffers worked in the offices, before the pandemic, security was so tight that, if window washers appeared outside their windows, staff would get up and close the blinds. Staff had to empty their own trash from their locked-down offices — outside workers, even cleaners, aren’t allowed to enter the inner sanctum of statistics.
This chart makes me wonder if some Trump appointee is screwing around trying to make the recovery look bad prior to the elections that just happened.
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doublejj

Well-Known Member
California analyst predicts $31 billion budget surplus

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California is on track to have so much money that state officials will likely have to give even more of it back to taxpayers to meet constitutional limits on state spending, according to a new forecast from the state's independent Legislative Analyst's Office.

The state's annual “Fiscal Outlook,” released Wednesday, predicts a $31 billion surplus for the 2022 budget year that begins July 1. The analyst's office says state is on pace to have so much money that it could exceed a constitutional limit on state spending by $26 billion over three years. That could require Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to either cut taxes, spend more money on infrastructure or — perhaps the most popular choice in an election year — give rebates to taxpayers and spend more on public schools.
and this is during the global pandemic.....Newsom for President! :clap:
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hanimmal

Well-Known Member
California analyst predicts $31 billion budget surplus

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California is on track to have so much money that state officials will likely have to give even more of it back to taxpayers to meet constitutional limits on state spending, according to a new forecast from the state's independent Legislative Analyst's Office.

The state's annual “Fiscal Outlook,” released Wednesday, predicts a $31 billion surplus for the 2022 budget year that begins July 1. The analyst's office says state is on pace to have so much money that it could exceed a constitutional limit on state spending by $26 billion over three years. That could require Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to either cut taxes, spend more money on infrastructure or — perhaps the most popular choice in an election year — give rebates to taxpayers and spend more on public schools.
and this is during the global pandemic.....Newsom for President! :clap:
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But he had dinner at a restaurant that one time!
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/28/biden-spending-plan-what-is-in-it/
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House Democrats on Friday morning passed a more than $2 trillion bill to overhaul the country’s health care, climate, education and tax laws, moving beyond months of disputes between liberals and moderates that have stalled President Biden’s economic agenda.

The legislation builds off a framework that Biden unveiled to party lawmakers and includes new spending to enhance child care, provide free prekindergarten, combat climate change and advance a slew of tax benefits that chiefly aid low-income Americans.

But the bill omits many of Democrats’ top priorities, a reflection of the party’s difficult work to scale back a package once valued at $3.5 trillion. It now moves to the Senate, where it may face further cuts.

What follows is a guide to the legislation, one of the most significant overhauls of domestic policy in generations.

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doublejj

Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/28/biden-spending-plan-what-is-in-it/
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House Democrats on Friday morning passed a more than $2 trillion bill to overhaul the country’s health care, climate, education and tax laws, moving beyond months of disputes between liberals and moderates that have stalled President Biden’s economic agenda.

The legislation builds off a framework that Biden unveiled to party lawmakers and includes new spending to enhance child care, provide free prekindergarten, combat climate change and advance a slew of tax benefits that chiefly aid low-income Americans.

But the bill omits many of Democrats’ top priorities, a reflection of the party’s difficult work to scale back a package once valued at $3.5 trillion. It now moves to the Senate, where it may face further cuts.

What follows is a guide to the legislation, one of the most significant overhauls of domestic policy in generations.

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republicans suck...
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/19/build-back-better-passes-dumb-gop-attack/Screen Shot 2021-11-19 at 9.21.01 PM.png
When the House passed the Build Back Better social policy bill on Friday morning, every Republican voted against a nearly $1.5 trillion tax hike on the rich and corporations.

Yet Republicans are planning to seize on this vote to proclaim Democrats are the party of plutocrats.

Yes, you read that correctly. House Democrats just passed the second half of President Biden’s agenda — the BBB social policy bill — with all House Republicans voting against it. And the package contains the largest high-end tax increase in more than a decade.

But somehow, Republicans are already telegraphing that they will focus on a single provision in the bill to argue that Democrats are the party that … cuts taxes for the rich.

While Republicans will launch all kinds of absurd attacks, this one is of particular interest: It captures something essential about the true ideological differences between the two parties and about the peculiar coalitional problems Democrats now face.

Republicans are seizing on the provision that lifts the cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT) to insist Democrats are delivering the rich a huge tax cut. The proposal would lift the cap on deductions from $10,000 to $80,000 through 2030.

Top Republicans are declaring this shows Democrats are “out of touch,” are selling out “working families,” are “shoveling money to the rich” and are rewarding “liberal elites,” particularly in wealthy coastal enclaves.

Okay, then. Here is a partial list of what Republicans just voted against:
  • A surtax on incomes over $10 million
  • A corporate minimum tax that would prevent profitable corporations from gaming down their tax bills, sometimes to zero
  • A curb on multinational corporations avoiding huge amounts of taxes by shielding income through all manner of profit-shifting chicanery abroad
  • Beefed-up IRS enforcement to crack down on wealthy tax cheats

These provisions would raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations by a total of at least $1.4 trillion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. They would help correct for vast inequalities in our tax code and curb ways elites have long gamed it to enrich themselves.

Every House Republican voted against all of it. Given that Republicans also passed a 2017 tax cut that lavished enormous benefits on corporations and the rich, the idea that Republicans will highlight the SALT provision to cast Democrats as the party of plutocrats is beyond ludicrous.

“Republicans oppose a $1.4 trillion tax increase on corporations and high-income taxpayers,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told me. “They justify this by highlighting the modest relief for state and local taxes paid by some high-income taxpayers, which is minor by comparison.”

“Making the Republican stance all the more ridiculous,” Rosenthal continued, Republicans in 2017 “cut taxes by nearly $2 trillion, largely for corporations and the rich.”

To be clear, it’s a problem that Democrats lifted the SALT cap, in numerous ways. First, it is a regressive tax cut that will indeed disproportionately benefit the very well-off.

But Democrats can fix this when the Senate takes up BBB. One idea pushed by progressive senators and think tanks is to make the deduction available only to incomes below $400,000.

Second, this does highlight a real coalitional problem Democrats face. The SALT cap hits households with higher incomes who pay large amounts in state and local taxes, and these tend to be in blue states with higher taxes and more public services.

So by lifting the cap, Democrats are appealing in part to wealthier suburbanites in coastal states who want to use already-high state taxes they pay to relieve their federal tax burden. That’s why this is necessary to get House moderates in places such as New York, New Jersey and California to support BBB.

So the Democratic reliance on those voters does risk pushing the Democratic agenda in a more regressive direction. And it’s why Republicans are attacking this as a giveaway to liberal and coastal elites.

But this also points to a deeper absurdity in the GOP attack, one that concerns the history here.

The SALT cap was originally included in the 2017 tax law by Republicans. They wanted to raise revenue to make their enormous tax cut for the rich and corporations look a little less fiscally unreasonable.

Chye-Ching Huang, a tax expert at New York University, points out that this really means Republicans essentially raised taxes on higher-income individuals in those states to offset a huge tax cut on even wealthier individuals.

“The 2017 tax law capping the SALT deduction was used to pay for tax cuts that were overall even more tilted to the wealthiest filers,” Huang told me.

In short, Republicans are comfortable attacking tax cuts for higher-end individuals, but only when it mainly targets blue state and coastal taxpayers, even though Republicans cut taxes on high-income individuals by far more. They’re posing as anti-elite by singling out this one provision, while voting against undoing the enormous tax cut for the rich that they themselves implemented.

Making this even more ridiculous, overall BBB raises taxes on the wealthy to fund investments in fighting climate change, curbing child poverty, expanding health care access on multiple fronts, and a whole host of other social supports.

And Republicans want to attack Democrats as plutocrats? No one should pretend there’s a shred of legitimacy to this nonsense.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/22/legal-immigrant-workers-paperwork-renewal-backlog/Screen Shot 2021-11-23 at 7.40.16 AM.png
Helen Muradyan, a second-year resident physician, stopped working last month.

Not because her skills aren’t needed. To the contrary: The Southern California community hospital and health clinic that employed Muradyan struggle to find staff even during normal times. The pandemic worsened their staffing shortages.

“At one point we were operating at 150 percent of capacity,” Muradyan told me. “We worked day, night. We worked without breaks or anything, without seeing our loved ones, without seeing our family.”

But Muradyan, an immigrant from Armenia, had to stop working — because the U.S. government couldn’t be bothered to process her application to renew her work permit. Eventually, her existing work permit expired, and her employers had to terminate her.

Many factors contribute to our nationwide labor shortages, which are, in turn, driving supply-chain problems and inflation. Most of those issues — lack of child care, early retirements, fear of getting ill, burnout — would be difficult for employers or policymakers to resolve even if wages rise. But there’s one underappreciated factor contributing to labor shortfalls that the Biden administration could alleviate almost immediately: the “missing” immigrant workers.

Immigration inflows slowed sharply during the Trump administration and then collapsed under the combination of Trump-era policies and pandemic-driven closures. The number of visas issued by the State Department’s Foreign Service posts, for example, fell by more than 60 percent between fiscal years 2016 and 2020. There are millions fewer immigrants here today than would have been the case if pre-Trump trends in immigration had continued.

But the labor force is also losing immigrants already here legally, whose work permits are expiring because the Biden administration hasn’t gotten its act together.

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For immigrants in the country lawfully, renewing an existing work permit was once relatively straightforward. When Muradyan applied for a renewal in 2019, she recalls the process took two to three months. That’s close to the average processing time such applications required in recent years.

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Cases such as Rios’s or Muradyan’s shouldn’t take long to adjudicate: On average, USCIS employees spend only 12 minutes before rendering a decision on each employment authorization application, according to a 2019 agency estimate.

But the queue to get any specific application reviewed is long — and growing. As of June 30, nearly 1.4 million employment authorization applications were pending. That’s double the size of the backlog that existed right before covid-19 reached the United States. It’s triple the number from the quarter just before Donald Trump took office.

Multiple factors have expanded the backlog: Pre-pandemic, Trump officials had deliberately slowed down processing of nearly all immigration-related applications. The red tape and other obstacles they added increased costs not just for applicants but also USCIS. The agency had a budget crisis last year and ultimately froze the hiring of new employees and laid off contractors.

Covid safety measures then further slowed processing.

The Biden administration has reversed many Trump-era policies but the agency remains understaffed. And shrinking the work-permit backlog does not appear to be a Biden administration priority, even as it touts a “whole-of-government” approach to unblocking supply chains and reducing inflationary pressures.

When asked what role the constricted immigrant labor force might play in today’s economic bottlenecks, White House officials often change the subject. When I asked USCIS what it is doing to shorten wait times for employment documents, the agency said it was “committed to using all available policy and operational improvements to reduce both the number of pending cases and overall processing times,” and cited several changes it has made to expedite processing. (Some of those were the result of a recent settlement in a different class-action case.)

The problem, says Cato Institute research fellow David Bier, is that the administration has "done a lot of the reversing of the bad stuff that Trump did to slow things down even more, but not enough to go above and beyond that necessary to get rid of the backlogs and added delays that the Trump policies originally created.”

So what could USCIS do, while it rebuilds it staff?

Eliminating some redundancies from the process is a good start. The agency could also automatically extend more existing work permits while applicants wait for their renewals to be processed. Some categories of noncitizens already get this courtesy, but even those grace periods are too short. Asylum seekers, for instance, have their existing work permits auto-extended for up to 180 days while the renewal application awaits processing. But as Muradyan’s case and others show, that’s not enough time to avoid a lapse in employment.

“It doesn’t make sense, that if someone really wants to work, they can’t go back to work because of these delays,” she said. “It’s like they just don’t care.”
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/biden-oil-strategic-reserve-gas-prices-a7e0802b299cd627c7ffdeeb0e50bd2cScreen Shot 2021-11-23 at 11.02.07 AM.png
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered 50 million barrels of oil released from America’s strategic reserve to help bring down energy costs, in coordination with other major energy consuming nations, including China, India and the United Kingdom.

The move is aimed at global energy markets, but also at U.S. voters who are coping with higher inflation and rising prices ahead of Thanksgiving and winter holiday travel. Gasoline prices are at about $3.40 a gallon, more than 50% higher than a year ago, according to the American Automobile Association.

Administration officials said that reports of a possible release and consultations with other countries ahead of the announcement had caused oil prices to drop nearly 10% in anticipation of the news. The government will begin to move barrels into the market in mid to late December.

But the actions are unlikely to immediately bring down gas prices significantly as families begin traveling for the holidays. Administration officials noted that gasoline usually responds at a lag to changes in oil prices, and they suggested this is one of several steps in ultimately bringing down costs.

There was no discernable impact on the price for a benchmark barrel of U.S. crude right after the announcement. Prices have been up and down all month, and were up less than 1% so far in this holiday shortened week.

The actions by the U.S. and others risk counter moves by Gulf nations, especially Saudi Arabia, and by Russia. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have made clear they intend to control supply to keep prices high for the time being.

As word spread in recent days of a coming joint release from U.S. and other countries’ reserves, there were warnings from OPEC interests that those countries may respond in turn, reneging on promises to increase supplies in coming months.

Biden has scrambled to reshape much of his economic agenda around the issue of inflation, saying that his recently passed $1 trillion infrastructure package will reduce price pressures by making it more efficient and cheaper to transport goods.

Republican lawmakers have hammered the administration for inflation hitting a 31-year high in October. The consumer price index soared 6.2% from a year ago — the biggest 12-month jump since 1990.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell tore into the White House in a floor speech last week, saying the victims of higher prices were middle class Americans.

“The three biggest drivers of the staggering 6.2% inflation rate we logged last month were housing, transportation, and food,” the Kentucky senator said. “Those aren’t luxuries, they’re essentials, and they take up a much bigger share of families’ budgets from the middle class on down.”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is an emergency stockpile to preserve access to oil in case of natural disasters, national security issues and other events. Maintained by the Energy Department, the reserves are stored in caverns created in salt domes along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. There are roughly 605 million barrels of sweet and sour petroleum in the reserve.

“As we come out of an unprecedented global economic shutdown, oil supply has not kept up with demand, forcing working families and businesses to pay the price,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. “This action underscores the president’s commitment to using the tools available to bring down costs for working families and to continue our economic recovery.”

The Biden administration has argued that the reserve is the right tool to help ease the supply problem. Americans used an average of 20.7 million barrels a day during September, according to the Energy Information Administration. That means that the release nearly equals about two-and-a-half days of additional supply.

The pandemic made energy markets — like everything else — haywire on multiple fronts. As the closures began in April, 2020, demand collapsed and oil futures prices turned negative. Energy traders did not want to get stuck with crude that they could not store. But as the economy recovered, prices jumped to a seven-year high in October.

U.S. production has not recovered. Energy Information Administration figures indicate that domestic production is averaging roughly 11 million barrels daily, down from 12.8 million before the pandemic started.

Republicans have also seized on Biden’s efforts to minimize drilling and support renewable energy as a reason for the decreased production, though there are multiple market dynamics at play as fossil fuel prices are higher around the world.

“President Biden’s policies are hiking inflation and energy prices for the American people. Tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will not fix the problem,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming. “We are experiencing higher prices because the administration and Democrats in Congress are waging a war on American energy.”

Meanwhile, Biden and administration officials insist that tapping more oil from the reserve is not a contradiction with the president’s long-term climate goals, because this is a short-term fix to meet a specific problem, while climate policies are a long-term answer over decades.

They argue that because they are pushing to boost renewable energy, there will eventually be less dependence in the U.S. on fossil fuels. But that’s a politically convenient argument - in simple terms, higher prices reduce usage, and significantly higher gasoline prices could force Americans into less reliance on fossil fuels.

The White House decision comes after weeks of diplomatic negotiations. Biden and China President Xi Jinping talked over steps to counter tight petroleum supplies in their virtual meeting earlier this month, when the two “discussed the importance of taking measures to address global energy supplies,” according to the White House account of the conversation.

Japan and South Korea are also participating. Administration officials say it’s the biggest coordinated release from global strategic reserves.

The U.S. Department of Energy will make the oil available from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in two ways; 32 million barrels will be released in the next few months and will return to the reserve in the years ahead, the White House said. Another 18 million barrels will be part of a sale of oil that Congress had previously authorized.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday evening that the White House would also keep tabs on the oil companies, too.

“We will continue to press oil companies who have made record profits and are overseeing what we consider to be price gouging out there when there’s a supply of oil or the price of oil is coming down and the price of gas is not coming down,” Psaki said. “It does not take an economic expert to know that’s a problem.”
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-economy-jobless-claims-a774386e727ad7c917a669f5712deb32Screen Shot 2021-11-24 at 11.44.33 AM.png
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits plummeted last week to the lowest level in more than half a century, another sign that the U.S. job market is rebounding rapidly from last year’s coronavirus recession.

Jobless claims dropped by 71,000 to 199,000, the lowest since mid-November 1969. But seasonal adjustments around the Thanksgiving holiday contributed significantly to the bigger-than-expected drop. Unadjusted, claims actually ticked up by more than 18,000 to nearly 259,000.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out weekly ups and downs, also dropped — by 21,000 to just over 252,000, the lowest since mid-March 2020 when the pandemic slammed the economy.

Since topping 900,000 in early January, the applications have fallen steadily toward and now fallen below their prepandemic level of around 220,000 a week. Claims for jobless aid are a proxy for layoffs.

Overall, 2 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment checks the week that ended Nov. 13, down slightly from the week before.

“Overall, expect continued volatility in the headline figures, but the trend remains very slowly lower,” Contingent Macro Advisors wrote in a research note.

Until Sept. 6, the federal government had supplemented state unemployment insurance programs by paying an extra payment of $300 a week and extending benefits to gig workers and to those who were out of work for six months or more. Including the federal programs, the number of Americans receiving some form of jobless aid peaked at more than 33 million in June 2020.

The job market has staged a remarkable comeback since the spring of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses to close or cut hours and kept many Americans at home as a health precaution. In March and April last year, employers slashed more than 22 million jobs.

But government relief checks, super-low interest rates and the rollout of vaccines combined to give consumers the confidence and financial wherewithal to start spending again. Employers, scrambling to meet an unexpected surge in demand, have made 18 million new hires since April 2020 and are expected to add another 575,000 this month. Still, the United States remains 4 million short of the jobs it had in February 2020.

Companies now complain that they can’t find workers to fill job openings, a near-record 10.4 million in September. Workers, finding themselves with bargaining clout for the first time in decades, are becoming choosier about jobs; a record 4.4 million quit in September, a sign they have confidence in their ability to find something better.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-joe-biden-health-business-richard-nixon-ae06d5cccf066239f9aa7f06491c7698Screen Shot 2021-11-24 at 11.47.35 AM.png
WASHINGTON (AP) — LBJ tried jawboning. Richard Nixon issued a presidential edict. The Ford administration printed buttons exhorting Americans to “Whip Inflation Now.”

Over the years, American presidents have tried, and mostly floundered, in their efforts to quell the economic and political menace of consumer inflation.

Now, President Joe Biden is giving it a shot.

Confronting a spike in gasoline and other consumer prices that’s bedeviling American households, Biden on Tuesday ordered the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S strategic petroleum reserve. The move, done in coordination with several other major nations, is intended to contain energy costs. Oil markets, having anticipated the move, were unimpressed with the details: Oil prices actually rose on the news.

It was just the latest step Biden has taken to show he is doing everything he can to combat inflation as gasoline and food prices, in particular, have imposed a growing burden on American households. On Monday, he announced that he would reappoint Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, a move meant in part to reassure financial markets that Washington is serious about containing consumer prices. Last month, he announced a deal to ease supply backlogs at the Port of Los Angeles by extending operations there to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Yet none of the president’s actions is considered likely to make a meaningful dent in surging prices anytime soon.

“I don’t think the president has many levers to pull to bring down the rate of inflation any time soon,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The things he is doing are positive, and there’s no downside to them ... but they are on the margins. They’re not going to move the dial very much.”

Inflation is always a tough foe, made even more complicated by the unusual recovery from the pandemic recession, with shortages of supplies and workers and shipping bottlenecks forcing up prices.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO CONSUMER PRICES?

The government’s consumer price index skyrocketed 6.2% in the 12 months that ended in October — the sharpest such jump since 1990.

Coming after nearly four decades of more or less stable prices, the CPI news represents a “once-in-a-generation uptick in inflation,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University political scientist who studies the Fed. “The problem is pretty stark because it’s something that voters notice. It’s hard to escape the impact of a spike in inflation on your daily life, whether it’s buying milk or buying gas.’’

The average price of regular gasoline has shot up to $3.40 a gallon from $2.11 a year ago, according to AAA.

Compounding the pain and heightening the pressure on Biden, inflation has been outpacing Americans’ income. Adjusted for price increases, average hourly wages were actually down 1.2% last month compared with a year earlier.

“Inflation is painful, and it’s always political,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE PRICE SPIKE?

It’s partly the consequence of very good news. The world economy — and America’s in particular — rebounded with unexpected speed and strength from last year’s brief but intense recession. It was a result of super-low interest rates, massive government spending and, eventually, the broad rollout of vaccines that allowed more of the economy to reopen.

The swiftness of the rebound caught businesses off guard. A year and a half ago, they were bracing for the worst — laying off workers, letting shelves and warehouses go bare, reducing investment and factory output.

And energy companies did the same: They cut production of oil and gas as demand for transportation fuels plummeted. Once demand came roaring back, they were unprepared. They found themselves scrambling to call back workers and buy enough to fill customer orders. Ports and freight yards couldn’t handle the traffic. Countries competed over boatloads of overpriced liquid natural gas. Periodic COVID-19 outbreaks shut down Asian ports and factories. Global supply chains broke down.

As costs rose, many businesses found that they could pass the burden along to consumers in the form of higher prices. In the meantime, many families had banked their government relief checks and built up their savings. Some critics also blamed Biden’s $1.9 trillion emergency aid package for overheating the economy and contributing to inflation pressures.

Economists are divided over how long the inflation spike will last. Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial, predicts that inflationary pressures will ease as supply chains sort themselves out.

“I expect to see inflation slow in 2022,″ he said.

WHAT CAN PRESIDENTS DO?

The White House has limited tools for reversing higher prices. That task belongs more to the Fed, which can raise borrowing costs to cool a sizzling economy. During the 1960s and 1970s, though, presidents increasingly felt pressure to do something about inflation because it had become a serious political threat.

President Lyndon Johnson tried to persuade companies to forgo price increases and labor unions to limit wage demands — a practice known as “jawboning.” When Bethlehem Steel raised steel prices in 1965, Johnson criticized its executives as unpatriotic, and they backed down, according to Robert Samuelson’s book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath.” When egg prices rose in 1966, Johnson ordered America’s surgeon general to highlight the health hazards of cholesterol in eggs, with the intent of lowering egg sales and therefore prices.

Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971 and 1973, which briefly stifled inflation, only to see prices soar once the controls were lifted.

Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” program encouraged Americans to grow their own vegetables, reduce their food waste and consume less. Americans responded mostly by mocking the program. Some wore the president’s WIN buttons upside down, explaining that the resulting NIM stood for “No Immediate Miracles.”

WHAT HAS BIDEN DONE?

Biden last week signed into a law a $1 trillion public works program, which pours money into fixing roads, bridges and ports, potentially easing the supply chain backlogs that have contributed to rising prices. Untangling shipping bottlenecks would be doubly helpful: It would ease inflationary pressures and boost the economy by increasing the flow of goods to customers.

Last week, Biden sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking the FTC chair to consider investigating whether higher gasoline prices were the result of “illegal conduct.” The White House is also stepping up anti-trust enforcement of the meatpacking industry, seeking to increase competition and drive down meat prices.

His decision to re-nominate Powell to lead the Fed was meant, in part, to reassure the financial markets of Washington’s resolve to prevent consumer prices from spiraling out of his control. The other likely contender for the job — Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors — was perceived as less hawkish toward inflation.

WHY DID BIDEN TAP THE STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE TUESDAY?

The idea was that by putting more oil on the market, prices would fall. That hasn’t happened. But depending on what happens in the rest of the world, there’s still a chance it could work.

America’s petroleum reserve holds about 605 million barrels of oil in underground caves in Texas and Louisiana. It was designed in the 1970s in response to the Arab oil embargo to store oil in case there was a supply disruption or emergency. But the dynamics of the global oil industry changed dramatically in recent years, and now the U.S exports more oil than it imports.

The 50 million barrels that Biden promised to release will likely be sold slowly, at a rate of about 1 million barrels per day, meaning that the new influx of oil could last about two months. Adding even a small amount of oil to the market can tip it into surplus, and potentially lower the price, said Jim Burkhard of IHS Markit.

“The immediate price reaction is not the final judgment on the effectiveness of this of the effort,” he added. “It will really be in the months ahead.”
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.rawstory.com/how-the-rich-benefit-under-trump/Screen Shot 2021-11-26 at 6.46.42 AM.png
Donald Trump's presidency and the Covid pandemic combined to make 2020 a remarkably enriching year for the highest-paid workers in America. Meanwhile, the numbers for the bottom 99.9% are, in a word, awful.

Just one in 900 workers makes $1 million or more, a new Social Security report on wages shows. My annual analysis of this data shows that this thin and rich group made 14% more money in 2020 than in 2019.

On average, the pretax pay of the $1 million-and-up workers increased by $305,600. That's after adjusting for inflation.
The share of all pay going to $1 million-and-up workers grew by a fourth during Trump's four years.
The other 99.9% of American workers got an average raise of just $76 each. But even that overstates how badly most workers did. That's because most of this minuscule pay increase went to the 1/10th of workers making $100,000 to $1 million. The bottom 88%, those making less than $100,000, got next to nothing.

The standard measure for worker pay is the median. It illustrates the typical pay situation because at the median, half of workers make more while half make less. Median pay in 2020 rose by a mere $26.

Put another way, for each $1 of increased pay going to the typical worker, each worker in the two-comma club collected $11,750.


Suppose $26 is the height of the heel of a shoe worn by a man standing on Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower. The heel is 1 inch. The height for the highest-paid workers' pay would soar 315 feet above that 58-story highrise, for a total of 908 feet. That's a lot of heels. Plus one.

Trump has a policy: One for you, thousands for the rich; another for you, thousands more for the rich…

And don't forget, Trump's 2017 tax law gave the most highly paid workers a roughly 4% federal income-tax cut. Also, those workers tend to be the Americans with significant stock portfolios and Trump gave corporations a 40% tax-rate cut. So, they got a two-fer.

Crumbs for the Rest

You didn't get anything like either of those income-tax cuts. You got crumbs in tax savings plus the burden of $2 trillion in federal debt to pay for the Trump/Radical Republican tax cuts.

Indeed, if you live in the states with most of the high-paying jobs – California, Connecticut, New York, Maryland and the like – Trump and congressional Republicans increased federal incomes for millions of people. That's because Trump and the Radical Republicans took away your deductions for state and local income and property taxes and mortgage interest. The number of Americans who itemize deductions, including charitable gifts, fell by three-fourths after Trump's tax cuts for the rich and the companies they own became law.

More pay going to workers at the top is a long-term trend that began long before Trump. What's significant in the newest data is how much that trend accelerated during the Trump years.

In 2016, just 143 workers made $50 million or more. That number jumped 50% in Trump's first year as president and stayed at that level in 2018 and 2019. But in 2020, Trump's last year as president, the number of workers paid $50 million and up soared to 358, 1.5 times as much as under Barack Obama.

Monthly gross paychecks for those 358 highest-paid workers averaged close to $8 million each. A worker at the median pay would have to labor for more than 225 years to get paid what these workers made in a month.

More for the Top

Even more significant, the share of all pay going to $1 million-and-up workers grew by a fourth during Trump's four years.

Their collective pay rose to 5.2% of all worker compensation, up from 4.2% of total compensation in 2016 under Obama. That means most workers got a thinner slice of the American wage pie under Trump, the opposite of MAGA pledges to improve most incomes and just as I predicted back in 2015 and 2016.

The median worker in 2020 made just $34,612, or less than $3,000 a month before taxes. During Trump's four years, inflation-adjusted median income rose by 5%.

By far the biggest increase in median pay in this century occurred in 2014 under Obama when Social Security data show an increase of 3.44% over 2013.

The average pay for all workers was $53,383.18, or less than $4,500 per month.

More than two-thirds of workers made less than the average. The average is higher than the median because all those very highly paid workers skew the average upward.

One more awful fact: The number of Americans with any work fell in 2020 by more than 1 percentage point. In 2020, more than 1.7 million fewer people found any paid work than in 2019. That's the first time this has happened in all of Trump's life.

While Trump at his inaugural promised that every act he took would be for the benefit of the "forgotten men and women" of America, it was all just another con.

His actions, again and again, favored the highly paid, the already rich and, not least of all, the Trump-Kushner family.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-congress-a48414850126c81c4215f991255b1bedScreen Shot 2021-12-03 at 7.03.19 AM.png
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has passed a stopgap spending bill that avoids a short-term shutdown and funds the federal government through Feb. 18 after leaders defused a partisan standoff over federal vaccine mandates. The measure now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.

Earlier Thursday, congressional leaders announced they had finally reached an agreement to keep the government running for 11 more weeks, generally at current spending levels, while adding $7 billion to aid Afghanistan evacuees.

Once the House voted to approve the measure, senators soon announced an agreement that would allow them to vote on it quickly.

“I am glad that in the end, cooler heads prevailed. The government will stay open and I thank the members of this chamber for walking us back from the brink of an avoidable, needless and costly shutdown,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The Senate approved the measure by a vote of 69-28.

The Democratic-led House passed the measure by a 221-212 vote. The Republican leadership urged members to vote no; the lone GOP vote for the bill came from Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.

Lawmakers bemoaned the short-term fix and blamed the opposing party for the lack of progress on this year’s spending bills. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said the measure would, however, allow for negotiations on a package covering the full budget year through September.

“Make no mistake, a vote against this continuing resolution is a vote to shut government down,” DeLauro said during the House debate.

Before the votes, Biden said he had spoken with Senate leaders and he played down fears of a shutdown.

“There is a plan in place unless somebody decides to be totally erratic, and I don’t think that will happen,” Biden said.

Some Republicans opposed to Biden’s vaccine rules wanted Congress to take a hard stand against the mandated shots for workers at larger businesses, even if that meant shutting down federal offices over the weekend by blocking a request that would expedite a final vote on the spending bill.

It was just the latest instance of the brinkmanship around government funding that has triggered several costly shutdowns and partial closures over the past two decades. The longest shutdown in history happened under President Donald Trump — 35 days stretching into January 2019, when Democrats refused to approve money for his U.S-Mexico border wall. Both parties agree the stoppages are irresponsible, yet few deadlines pass without a late scramble to avoid them.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Democrats knew last month that several Republicans would use all means at their disposal to oppose legislation that funds or allows the enforcement of the employer vaccine mandate. He blamed Schumer for not negotiating and for ignoring their position.

If the choice is between “suspending nonessential functions” or standing idle while Americans lose their ability to work, “I’ll stand with American workers every time,” Lee said.

Lee and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., authored an amendment that prohibited federal dollars being spent to implement and enforce a series of vaccine mandates put in place by the Biden administration. The amendment went down to defeat with 48 yes votes and 50 no votes. But having the vote opened the door to taking up the full spending bill immediately.

Lee said millions were being forced to choose between an unwanted medical procedure and losing their job.

“Their jobs are being threatened by their own government,” Lee said.

“Let’s give employers certainty and employees peace of mind that they will still have a job this new year,” Marshall urged before the vote.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., countered that the federal government should be using every tool to keep Americans safe and that is why the Biden administration has taken steps to urge employers to make sure their workers are fully vaccinated or test negative before they come to the workplace.

“No one wants to go to work and be worried they might come home to their family with a deadly virus,” Murray said.

The White House sees the vaccinations as the quickest way to end a pandemic that has killed more than 780,000 people in the United States and is still evolving, as seen Wednesday with the country’s first detected case of a troubling new variant.

Courts have knocked back against the mandates, including a ruling this week blocking enforcement of a requirement for some health care workers.

For some Republicans, the court cases and lawmakers’ fears about a potentially disruptive shutdown were factors against engaging in a high-stakes shutdown.

“One of the things I’m a little concerned about is: Why would we make ourselves the object of public attention by creating the specter of a government shutdown?” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a GOP leader.

The administration has pursued vaccine requirements for several groups of workers, but the effort is facing legal setbacks.

A federal judge this week blocked the administration from enforcing a vaccine mandate on thousands of health care workers in 10 states. Earlier, a federal appeals court temporarily halted the OSHA requirement affecting employers with 100 or more workers.

The administration has also put in place policies requiring millions of federal employees and federal contractors, including military troops, to be fully vaccinated. Those efforts are also under challenge.

Polling from The Associated Press shows Americans are divided over Biden’s effort to vaccinate workers, with Democrats overwhelmingly for it while most Republicans are against.

Some Republicans prefer an effort from Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., to vote to reject the administration’s mandates in a congressional review action expected next week, separate from the funding fight.

Separately, some health care providers protested the stopgap spending measure. Hospitals say it does nothing to shield them from Medicare payment cuts scheduled to go into effect amid uncertainty about the new omicron variant.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Got to wonder what the revision will end up being this time.
The charts are interactive on the AP news website.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-business-unemployment-economy-e62c5ed35f69bc763a6d297858ceb084
Screen Shot 2021-12-03 at 11.40.06 AM.png
WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers slowed the pace of their hiring in November, adding 210,000 jobs, the lowest monthly gain in nearly a year.

But Friday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the nation’s unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6% to 4.2% evidence that many more people reported that they had a job. That is a historically low jobless rate though still above the pre-pandemic level of 3.5%.

Overall, the November jobs figures point to a job market and an economic recovery that look resilient though under threat from a spike in inflation, shortages of workers and supplies and the potential impact of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Screen Shot 2021-12-03 at 11.37.48 AM.png

For months, employers have been struggling with worker shortages because many people who lost jobs in the pandemic have not, for various reasons, returned to the workforce. But last month, more Americans came off the sidelines to look for jobs and were generally hired quickly.

That positive trend suggests that November was a healthier month for job growth than the modest 210,000 gain the government reported Friday in its survey of businesses. The unemployment rate is calculated from a separate survey of households. This survey found that a much larger 1.1 million more people reported that they were employed last month. The results of the two surveys typically match up over the long run but sometimes diverge sharply in a given month, as they did in November.

The survey of households found that the number of unemployed Americans sank in November to 6.9 million, not far above the pre-pandemic number of 5.7 million. And average wages, which have been rising as employers try to attract or keep workers, increased a strong 4.8% from a year ago.

Screen Shot 2021-12-03 at 11.36.36 AM.png

The government’s survey of businesses showed a slowdown last month in hiring at restaurants, bars and hotels, which added just 23,000 jobs, down from 170,000 in October. That could reflect the effects of an uptick in COVID-19 cases last month and a reduction in outdoor dining.

Retailers cut 20,000 jobs, a sign that holiday hiring hasn’t been as strong as in previous years. But transportation and warehousing firms added 50,000 positions, which indicates that online retailers and shippers anticipate healthy online shopping.

The jobs outlook for the coming months has become hazier with the emergence of the omicron variant. Little is definitively known about omicron, and widespread business shutdowns are considered unlikely. Still, omicron could discourage some Americans from traveling, shopping and eating out in the coming months and potentially slow the economy.

For now, though, Americans are spending freely, and the economy is forecast to expand at a 7% annual rate in the final three months of the year, a big rebound from the 2.1% pace in the previous quarter, when the delta variant hobbled growth.

Nearly 600,000 people joined the workforce last month, increasing the proportion of Americans who are either working or looking for work. If that much-anticipated development continues, it could point to stronger job growth ahead.

The proportion of Americans who are in the workforce rose from 61.6% to 61.8%, the first significant increase since April.

Even as the jobless rate has steadily declined this year, the proportion of Americans who are working or looking for work has barely budged. A shortage of job-seekers tends to limit hiring and force companies to pay more to attract and keep employees. Higher pay can help sustain spending and growth. But it can also feed inflation if businesses raise prices to offset their higher labor costs, which they often do.

One result is that there are now about 3.6 million fewer people with jobs than there were before the pandemic. Yet only about one-third of them are actively looking for work and are classified as unemployed. The remaining two-thirds are no longer job-hunting and so aren’t counted as unemployed. The government classifies people as unemployed only if they’re actively seeking work.

Screen Shot 2021-12-03 at 11.38.22 AM.png

Whether or not more people start searching for jobs is a critical question for the Federal Reserve. If the proportion of people who either have a job or are looking for one doesn’t rise much, it would suggest that the Fed is nearing its goal of maximum employment.

With inflation at a three-decade high and far above the Fed’s 2% annual target, reaching its employment mandate would heighten pressure on Chair Jerome Powell to raise interest rates sooner rather than later. Doing so would make loans more expensive for many individuals and businesses.

About half of those who have dropped out of the workforce have retired. The other half includes parents, mostly mothers, who stayed home to care for children during closings of schools and day cares. For some of these women, child care remains unavailable or unaffordable. Some other people have become self-employed. And others continue to delay their job hunts for fear of contracting COVID-19.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
This is something I noticed when I got my booster, I was talking with the pharmacist (because he knows/worked with my wife) that was having to do all the normal business (which has been over the years 'optimized' to reduce staff hours, aka short staff their stores and squeeze more from the employees like the business flow is steady over an entire day and not several bursts that put them in the weeds), while also giving the shots to people who are scheduled 2 for every 15 minutes. Without any extra support.

Add in Trump's bullshit immigration bans, and the pandemic's impacts on graduations, and this is a nuts situation.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-joe-biden-science-business-health-b02158b1530871161f3c78d0ca915b67
Screen Shot 2021-12-05 at 6.11.30 AM.png
A rush of vaccine-seeking customers and staff shortages are squeezing drugstores around the U.S., leading to frazzled workers and temporary pharmacy closures.

Drugstores are normally busy this time of year with flu shots and other vaccines, but now pharmacists are doling out a growing number of COVID-19 shots and giving coronavirus tests.

The push for shots is expected to grow more intense as President Joe Biden urges vaccinated Americans to get booster shots to combat the emerging omicron variant. The White House said Thursday that more than two in three COVID-19 vaccinations are happening at local pharmacies.

And pharmacists worry another job might soon be added to their to-do list: If regulators approve antiviral pills from drugmakers Merck and Pfizer to treat COVID-19, pharmacists may be able to diagnose infections and then prescribe pills to customers.

“There’s crazy increased demand on pharmacies right now,” said Theresa Tolle, an independent pharmacist who has seen COVID-19 vaccine demand quadruple since the summer at her Sebastian, Florida, store.

Pharmacists say demand for COVID-19 vaccines started picking up over the summer as the delta variant spread rapidly. Booster shots and the expansion of vaccine eligibility to include children have since stoked it.

On top of that workload and routine prescriptions, many drugstores also have been asking pharmacists to counsel patients more generally on their health or about chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

Pharmacies also have been handling more phone calls from customers with questions about vaccines or COVID-19 tests, noted Justin Wilson, who owns three independent pharmacies in Oklahoma.

“We’re all working a lot harder than we did before, but we’re doing everything we can to take care of people,” Wilson said, adding that he has not had to temporarily close any of his pharmacies or limit hours so far.

Tolle said she was lucky to hire a pharmacy resident just before the delta surge arrived. The new employee was supposed to focus mostly on diabetes programs but has largely been relegated to vaccine duty.

Tolle said her Bay Street Pharmacy is now giving about 80 COVID-19 vaccines a day, up from 20 before the delta wave.

“God’s timing worked out well for me,” she said. “We would not have gotten through without having that additional person here.”

Others haven’t been as fortunate. A CVS Health store on the northeast side of Indianapolis shuttered its pharmacy in the middle of the afternoon Thursday due to staffing issues. A sign taped to the metal gate over the closed pharmacy counter also told customers that the pharmacy will soon start closing for a half hour each afternoon so the pharmacist can have a lunch break.

Such temporary closures have ebbed and flowed in pockets around the country throughout the pandemic, but they have grown more acute in recent months, said Anne Burns, a vice president with the American Pharmacists Association.

Pharmacies all need minimum staffing to operate safely, and they sometimes have to close temporarily if they fall below those levels.

Burns said many pharmacies already had relatively thin staffing levels heading into the pandemic, and a wave of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians left after the virus hit.

“There is a lot of stress and burnout for individuals who have been going at this since March of 2020,” she said.

CVS Health spokesman T.J. Crawford said he couldn’t comment on the circumstances for one store. But he said his company continues “to manage through a workforce shortage that isn’t unique to CVS Health.”

Rival drugstore chain Walgreens also has adjusted pharmacy hours “in a limited number of stores,” spokesman Fraser Engerman said.

Both companies are hiring. CVS Health says it has hired 23,000 employees from a push it started in September. About half of that total was pharmacy technicians, who can deliver vaccines.

As companies scramble to hire or keep staff, Burns and Tolle worry about adding even more responsibilities like diagnosing and treating COVID-19.

Tolle noted that it is not clear yet how pharmacists will be reimbursed for the time they take to diagnose and prescribe. That will have to be clarified, especially if cases surge again and drugstores need to add even more workers to help.

“We want to be able to help our communities,” she said. “I don’t know how pharmacies are going to manage it.”

Sherri Brown, a city employee in Omaha, Nebraska, was searching for a vaccine booster dose, but two nearby pharmacies didn’t have appointments available and a third didn’t have the brand she wanted. She wound up getting a shot at a county-run clinic on Friday.

“I just wanted to protect myself,” said Brown, who suffered through two weeks of coughing, headaches and fatigue when she caught the virus in January, before she was vaccinated. “I guess I’m encouraged to see that people are taking this more seriously.”
 

HGCC

Well-Known Member
Ours are pretty well staffed, but the volume is wild and you can tell they are running nonstop the entire shift. 1 person administering covid/flu shots, 1 or 2 bouncing between registers for pickup/drop off/questions/covid shot, and then a couple in the back taking pills from the big bottles into little ones.

Beats Walgreens I guess, I won't go there anymore. They couldn't figure out how to handle old people getting asthma medicine and a bunch of anti mask people having to get the covid shot. Just dumped em in a big pile.

Kind of curious what the wages are, creeping up slowly but surely, to circle this back around to the thread topic.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Ours are pretty well staffed, but the volume is wild and you can tell they are running nonstop the entire shift. 1 person administering covid/flu shots, 1 or 2 bouncing between registers for pickup/drop off/questions/covid shot, and then a couple in the back taking pills from the big bottles into little ones.

Beats Walgreens I guess, I won't go there anymore. They couldn't figure out how to handle old people getting asthma medicine and a bunch of anti mask people having to get the covid shot. Just dumped em in a big pile.

Kind of curious what the wages are, creeping up slowly but surely, to circle this back around to the thread topic.
The person with the pharmacist license (in Michigan) gets paid about $60 an hour (takes about 7 years of schooling for the degree). If they have a actual licensed pharmacy tech they can make about $15-$20 an hour and the rest make about $12 an hour (unless they have gotten more lately).
 
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