Rising costs are putting basic necessities out of reach for 37 percent or 1.2 million New Jersey households, according to the United Way ALICE Report released by United Way of Northern New Jersey.
“ALICE – Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; Study of Financial Hardship” shows that the minimum costs to survive in New Jersey rose by 23 percent since 2007, outpacing the rate of inflation of 14 percent. The report finds that it costs a single adult $24,300 to survive annually and $64,176 for a family of four with two children under the age of five.
By Stephen Stirling | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on January 16, 2017 at 7:30 AM, updated January 16, 2017 at 7:53 AM
Charlene O’Brian doesn’t want help.
The 38-year-old single mother of two has built her life on being a strong, independent woman. The Hardyston divorcee has a full-time job training educators, which she balances with raising her 7 and 10 year-old boys, the latter of which has special needs. In her spare time she runs and designs grueling obstacle courses, the kind that make even the biggest fitness buff think twice.
But O’Brian knows today she needs help. She just doesn’t know where to turn to get it.
“It doesn’t make me feel good. It’s been a struggle,” O’Brian said. “But it makes me want to make a difference.”
Investing.com — A new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton indicates that 94% of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were temporary positions.
The study shows that the jobs were temporary, contract positions, or part-time “gig” jobs in a variety of fields.
Female workers suffered most heavily in this economy, as work in traditionally feminine fields, like education and medicine, declined during the era.
The research by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that the proportion of workers throughout the U.S., during the Obama era, who were working in these kinds of temporary jobs, increased from 10.7% of the population to 15.8%.
PUBLISHED: 19:10 EST, 13 December 2016 | UPDATED: 19:10 EST, 13 December 2016
US technology giant IBM said Tuesday it would hire 25,000 people in the country over the next four years, a day before President-elect Donald Trump meets with tech industry leaders.
About 6,000 of those hirings will occur in 2017, IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty said in an opinion article published in the newspaper USA Today.
IBM, which has undertaken in recent years a restructuring of its activities, will invest $1 billion on employee training and development in the next four years, said the IBM president, chairman and CEO.
Ridgewood NJ, New Jersey ranked dead last in the nation in economic growth last year. The latest Census data shows that while the household median income in 2015 went up by 5.2 percent nationally, the household median income in New Jersey remained flat to stagnant.
The ugly reality is that New Jersey’s median income hasn’t increased or decreased in a statistically significant way since 2011. Before then, it had been in freefall since 2008 thanks to the recession.
In Bergen County Medium Household Income dropped from $89,452 in the 2005-2009 period to $85,806 or down -4.1% in the 2011-2015 period. That still beats the state average of a drop of 5% during the same period statewide and at the Federal level a decline of -4.7% .
While many young people are leaving the state for better job opportunities and lower cost of living environments the state still has the highest percentage of millennials living with their parents.
Garrett bills to reduce regulatory burdens and hold government accountable pass Financial Services Committee
June 17,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05), Chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, released the following statement after the House Financial Services Committee passed two bills he introduced; H.R. 5429, the SEC Regulatory Accountability Act and H.R. 4852, the Private Placement Improvement Act of 2016. In addition to Garrett’s bills, the subcommittee passed seven additional bills that Garrett guided through his subcommittee:
“Last month’s abysmal jobs report proves again that top-down, Washington-first economic policies are failing the American people. If we want to revitalize the economy, Congress needs to promote investment and reduce red tape by making it easier for investors and businesses across America to access capital and grow. Today the Financial Services Committee took steps to do that by passing two bills I sponsored and seven more from the Capital Markets subcommittee.
“My bills do two simple things. First, every business and every family does their own version of a cost-benefit analysis when making financial decisions, and the SEC will have to do the same under the SEC Regulatory Accountability Act. Second, the SEC needs to make sure it is implementing the JOBS Act to jumpstart the economy instead of imposing additional restrictions on investment. The Private Placement Improvement Act is designed to fix that problem.”
So far this Congress, 10 bills from Garrett’s subcommittee have been signed into law by President Obama—all with bipartisan support. With the passage of 9 bills today, 39 total bills from the Capital Markets subcommittee have been approved by the full committee this Congress.
Background:
H.R. 5429, the SEC Regulatory Accountability Act
The SEC has a three-part mission, investor protection, orderly markets, and capital formation. To make sure that the SEC is not restricting the flow of capital into our economy, Garrett’s bill would require the SEC to demonstrate that any rules it proposes will help our businesses grow by performing a cost-benefit analysis.
This codifies guidance that President Obama gave to executive branch agencies and will lend credibility to the SEC’s rules. Garrett’s bill ensures that businesses and start-ups have suitable supervision from the SEC and are not burdened by costly overregulation. The SEC Regulatory Accountability Act passed the House in 2013, as H.R. 1062, by a bipartisan vote.
H.R. 4852, the Private Placement Improvement Act
The SEC has the responsibility of implementing the innovative laws Congress passed in the JOBS Act and continues to have oversight of the private offering market for securities. However, the SEC was a year and a half late in making rules for general solicitation of private offerings under Title II of the JOBS Act, and continued a poor streak when, in 2013, it came out with new proposals to impede the private offering market.
The proposals would have hindered all Reg. D issues and not just those using general solicitation. The threat of expensive regulation hanging over the heads of investors has meant that the amount of capital raised under Reg. D has not grown in the manner that other areas of the market helped by the JOBS Act have. Garrett’s bill makes a single notice of sales sufficient for exemption from regulation under Reg. D and helps the JOBS Act reach its full potential by maintaining a clear and common-sense approach to regulations for private offerings.
Mark Twain is credited with saying “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” If he were around today Twain’s quote might go something like this: “Figures do lie, and liars figure out how to make people believe them.”
Granted, not as catchy.
But my quote goes a long way toward explaining something that is bothering many political pundits today. President Obama whined last week that he’s not getting enough credit for the economy.
Democrats are besides themselves wondering why Americans are so angry that they might be willing to elect Donald Trump president when the official unemployment rate is only 5%, oil prices are near their lowest level in a decade and the economy has been expanding for seven straight years.
Why aren’t Americans happier?
One of those pundits made me chuckle Tuesday night when he was talking about Trump’s primaries victories in another five states. He suggested that Americans were somehow being brainwashed by the media into thinking the economy was really bad when in fact it was good.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy sputtered in the first quarter, expanding at the slowest pace in two years as business slashed investment by the steepest amount since the Great Recession.
Gross domestic product, the sum of a nation’s economy, slowed to a 0.5% annual growth rate in the first three months of 2016, the government said Thursday. The U.S. had grown 1.4%, 2% and 3.9% in the prior three quarters.
Bloomberg More Americans are finding jobs at retail stores, but they aren’t getting the kind of pay and hours they’d like.
The number of able-bodied Americans entering the labor force has surged since last fall. But in a marked change from earlier in the recovery, more of them are finding jobs right away instead of just looking for work.
What’s going on? It’s hard to say for sure, but circumstantial evidence in the latest U.S. jobs report suggests many of these newly employed workers have found part-time work with mediocre pay.
The participation rate hit a two-year high of 63% in March, climbing from a 38-year low of 62.4% in September, the government said Friday. A person is considered part of the labor force if he finds or job or is actively searching for one.
According to today’s employment report, 59.8 percent of Americans ages 16 and older had jobs in February. That’s the highest employment-to-population ratio in years, and the rate of increase is clearly on the rise.
Look back some more years, though, and the story is different. The recent gains are real, but by the standards of the past few decades, a 59.8 percent employment-to-population ratio isn’t impressive.
Let this be another lesson in how the presentation of information shapes our understanding of it. The second chart paints a gloomy picture — the picture that Donald Trump may be referring to when he says the true unemployment rate is 40 percent or higher. A 59.8 percent employment-to-population ratio means that 40.2 percent of American civilians 16 and over don’t have jobs. That percentage includes high-school students, 100-year-olds and lots of other people who don’t want or need jobs, so the true unemployment rate clearlyisn’t 40 percent. Still, in April 2000 the employment-to-population ratio peaked at 64.7 percent. Now it’s significantly lower. What’s going on?
The answer that I keep gravitating to is that despite the 4.9 percent unemployment rate, the job market is still pretty weak, and probably malfunctioning in some way. This isn’t the only possible answer. In 2014, for example, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York divided people responding to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (from which the unemployment rate and the charts in this article are derived) into 280 cohorts defined by “birth, sex, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment.” They determined that most of the decline in the employment-to-population ratio since 2000 could be explained by the changing makeup of the population.
But demographics aren’t destiny. The employment-to-population ratios by age group, for example, have changed a lot since 1990. First, the women:
The economy expanded a touch slower in the third quarter than previously reported, revised government figures show, but the path of growth is still the same: The U.S. running well below the historical norm more than six years into a recovery.
Gross domestic product — the sum of all the activity in an economy — increased at a 2% annual pace from July to September, according to the government’s latest update. Previously the Commerce Department had said the U.S. grew at a 2.1% rate after a 3.9% increase in the second quarter.
The slight downgrade was triggered by a larger trade deficit and a smaller buildup in inventories than earlier estimates showed.
The U.S. expanded at a 2.2% rate through the first nine months of the year, and the economy is projected to grow at a similar pace in the fourth quarter that ends on Dec. 31. If so, the economy will have failed to reach 3% growth for the 10th straight year, marking the slowest stretch since the end of World War II.
Historically the economy has expanded at a 3.3% rate.
The government’s second update on GDP growth reflected a somewhat worse trade picture in the late summer and early fall. Exports rose a slower 0.7% instead of an earlier 0.9% estimate. And imports climbed 2.3% instead of 2.1%.
Companies also rebuilt inventories somewhat less than the government had tallied.
The value of inventories increased $85.5 billion, down from a prior $90.2 billion estimate. Inventories had jumped by $113.5 billion in the second quarter when the economy expanded at a much faster 3.9% clip.
Spending on home construction rose at a faster 8.2% pace in the third quarter instead of 7.3%, the revised Commerce Department figures show.
N.J. revenues fell further behind Christie projection in November
New Jersey tax collections so far this year were set back further in November by increasingly sluggish corporation business tax collections. Samantha Marcus, NJ.com Read more
At a time when 8.5 million Americans still don’t have jobs, some 40 percent have given up even looking.
The revelation, contained in a new survey Wednesday showing how much work needs to be done yet in the U.S. labor market, comes as the labor force participation rate remains mired near 37-year lows.
A tight jobs market, the skills gap between what employers want and what prospective employees have to offer, and a benefits program that, while curtailed from its recession level, still remains obliging have combined to keep workers on the sidelines, according to a Harris poll of 1,553 working-age Americans conducted for Express Employment Professionals.
On the bright side, the number is actually better than 2014, the survey’s inaugural year, when 47 percent of the jobless said they had given up.
“This survey shows that some of the troubling trends we observed last year are continuing,” Bob Funk, CEO of Express Employment Professionals and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said in a statement. “While the economy is indeed getting better for some, for others who have been unemployed long term, they are increasingly being left behind.”
NJ’s annual job growth slow, with some bright spots
JANUARY 23, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY HUGH R. MORLEY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
* State’s growth trails well behind nation’s
Four years after New Jersey reached its post-recession employment low, figures released Thursday show the state’s economic recovery continues to be slow.
The state added a modest 29,000 jobs in 2014, leaving employment far below its pre-recession peak and lower even than the level 14 years ago, according to the monthly employment report released by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The report showed New Jersey shed 400 jobs last month, even as national employment forged ahead strongly, adding 252,000 jobs in December. And although the state’s jobless rate dropped from 6.4 percent to 6.2 percent, it remains above the national figure of 5.6 percent.
The report, nevertheless, contained some positive elements, including the fact that the state added more jobs in 2014 than the previous year, despite the loss of thousands of casino jobs in Atlantic City, a very harsh winter and the lingering effects of Superstorm Sandy.
“It was a sustained, moderate pace of growth,” said Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at the accounting firm CohnReznick.
You mean the plan to “tax the rich” to fund the NJ economy and redistribute the wealth didn’t work?
How can that be?
It was such a good, well thought out, logical plan
Oh well, let’s try the same plan again – it will surely work next time.
Some time around the very birth of this blog , I sat in a local kitchen and across from me sat among other people Tom Keen Jr who at the time was considering a run for Governor.
I carefully laid out my concerns about what would happen to the North Jersey economy ,specifically Bergen County if the “Wall Street ” job engine would slow down or stop . I explained all those Wall Street salaries went to went to pay the very high taxes, rents and utilities as well as the effect of the enormous disposable income that was spent in shopping malls etc..
Tom looked across the table at me and said , “We are working on banning smoking in bars and restaurants” and I knew then that our representatives in Trenton have absolutely no clue what so ever as to what they are doing or even the most rudimentary understanding of economics .
Years later a certain leader of the “turf field”proponents,lets just call him Captain Jack used to say OFTEN that ,” if you can’t afford the high taxes you do not belong here ” and he would go on to claim that the high taxes actually caused the increase in property values. Funny how he left town be for the bill came do for the turf field he supported .
And that my friends is how the golden goose was killed with little fan fare and thus the mess we now find our selves in .
Reader says , “What will really hit the New York metro area is the rapid advancements in technology and communications, which will make it gradually unnecessary to have have “Wall St” and all it’s associated industries in law, accounting, etc., physically located in NY/NJ. This is a massive driver in terms of real estate, employment, and tax revenues for the tri-state area. The basic laws of supply and demand will eventually see this industry scatter. You might think your lifestyle and job is totally unconnected to Wall St, but you would be wrong.”
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