Republican Governors Eliminate Jobs and Raise Unemployment Rate by Firing Cops, Teachers and Firemen
by John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food / August 14, 2011
The private sector has added jobs in recent months, but government has lost jobs because Republican Governors are firing public workers.
In July total private sector employment rose by 154,000 over the month, reflecting job gains in several major industries, including health care, retail trade, manufacturing, and mining.
Government employment continued to decline mainly at the state and local levels which lost 39,000 jobs. The Federal level added 2000 jobs so the net new job creation was 117,000 jobs. At the state and local levels they are doing their level best to eliminate jobs and increase the unemployment rate at a time when the unemployment rate is approaching 10%.
Republican Governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Scott in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Chris Christie in New Jersey and John Kasich in Ohio are doing everything they can to make the job situation worse so that Obama won’t be reelected.
If all those teachers, policeman, firemen and snow plough drivers hadn’t been laid off, the unemployment rate would be a couple per cent lower. With the unemployment rate above 9% Obama’s chances of being reelected are nil and Republicans aim to keep it that way.
Now they are going after the Post Office which is considering laying off 120,000 workers!
This fiasco is being precipitated because the Republican Congress is forcing the Post Office to make overly huge payments into their pension fund thus causing a budget crisis. The fact that most U.S. citizens are using fewer USPS services due to improved electronic and computer communication, turns out not to be the main source of the problem. It turns out that the Post Office budget crsis has been totally manufactured by Republicans in Congress.
For the remainder of this article, please go here.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Who would blame a political group for the US Post Office lay offs before they checked the books? Do financial facts matter? Is it only anti- labor Republicans who now use e-mails instead of snail mail?
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/08/05/post-office-loses-3-5-billion-as-2011-cash-crunch-looms/
“The United States Postal Service delivered bad news on Thursday, reporting a $3.5 billion loss for its fiscal third quarter due to lower revenues from the continuing drop in mail volume and increased costs from retiree health benefit expenses.”
RB – once again you throw out a knee-jerk response and didn’t even read the article. Your link is to an article over a year old.
So now the age of the article and the anti-labor Republicans both are responsible for the lay offs? Here is the Aug 2011 data……..are these numbers too old? Does any one understand the link between massive losses and lay offs? Seems to me, blaming the Republicans for job losses at the post office is the knee-jerk reaction.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8282091
The US Postal Service says it lost $US3.1 billion ($A2.98 billion) in the April to June period and could be forced to default on payments due to the federal government when the fiscal year ends in September.
The thing about the Post Office is that it pays for itself. The only reason it is having financial “trouble” is due to a Congressionally-imposed requirement that other federal agencies are not subject to. And this is from a Republican led House. So, now they have fulfilled their own “prophesy” – and lay off thousands of Postal workers in a partisan-manufactured “financial crisis”.
Nice try Frank but in science a hypothesis such as yours must be tested before accepted. So lets look at the post office before the ‘Republican led House’.
August 2009
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/05/national/main5216012.shtml
“The post office says it lost $2.4 billion from April to June. That brings the year’s losses so far to $4.7 billion. And the Postal Service expects to be $7 billion in the red when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.”
The post office is an antiquated operation. UPS, Fed Ex and email is killing the Post Office. It’s silly to blame a Republican congress. It’s equally silly to blame the president for these job losses. This is the best we can expect from our politicians…blame the other guy when the rain false. Pathetic!
Not true, cp; the post office pays for itself. Yet the GOP-led Congress has imposed burdens on the dept that are not imposed on other federal departments. It is this burden – not the operations of the Post Office itself – that is causing politicians to target the PO.
Please explain how the Post Office “pays for itself”. The real revenue driver are commercial package and overnight deliveries….UPS and Fed Ex have been eating the Post Office’s lunch for years in that department. Think about the fuel and labor expense it takes to deliver a birthday card to every residence in the country. A big source of revenue for the PO is junk mail…hardly a value add for customers.
Our federal post office does pay for itself. It is the burdens that the right-wing GOP who control the House have placed on the agency that is driving it into the red.