How bad is the economy? 533,000 jobs lost in November

No wonder Dear Leader only comes out of his hole to pardon turkeys. This number -- unemployment meldown -- is his legacy that people will have at the forefront of their minds when Bush takes off from the White House lawn to a cushy retirement.

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

...The unemployment rates for adult men (6.5 percent) and adult women (5.5 percent) continued to trend up in November. The unemployment rates for teenagers (20.4 percent), whites (6.1 percent), blacks (11.2 percent), and Hispanics (8.6 percent) showed little change over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 4.8 percent in November, not seasonally adjusted.

Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their job and did not expect to be recalled to work increased by 298,000 to 4.7 million in November. Over the past 12 months, the size of this group has increased by 2.0 million.

Just think, only a couple of months ago, Bush and John McCain were saying the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Well, no thinking Americans bought that load of crap. In fact, consumer confidence is plummeting.

The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

“We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. “It is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs.”

Q of the day -- how bad is the economy in your neck of the woods? What kind of businesses are floundering, how bad are layoffs or slowdowns locally? I've seen at least one large car dealership go under where I am. Business at restaurants is slowing down. I do see crowds at the malls, but I don't know how many of these folks are window shopping or actually throwing down the $$$.

Heaven help Barack Obama. I don't know how he's going to fix this, or even get things on the right track with both the GOP and the short-attention span MSM and public breathing down his back to assign blame for not pulling an economic rabbit out of a hat.