Rare agreement: Obama, Romney, Ryan all endorse retraining for jobless—but are they right?, By Amy Goldstein, October 10, 2012, ProPublica.org: “In February 2008, six days before he would win the Wisconsin presidential primary, Barack Obama traveled to a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., for a major economic address. Janesville is a community of 63,000 on a bend in the Rock River near the Illinois line, three-fourths of the way up Interstate 90 from Chicago to Madison. On the sides of downtown buildings, pastel murals by area artists show scenes from the city’s past, hinting at its muscular civic spirit and outsized role in U.S. industry. ‘History. Vision. Sweat.’ is lettered across one mural’s bottom edge. The small city has been catapulted into public view as the hometown of this year’s Republican vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan. But long before, it was the home of Parker Pen. And for nearly a century, the soul of the local economy had been the Janesville Assembly Plant, where GM had started out making tractors and, in 1923, begun to build cars. The oldest operating automotive facility in the United States, it was even four years ago a storied site for a campaign speech…”
Author: townsend
State Unemployment Funds
States struggle with unemployment funds still in the red, By Jake Grovum, October 8, 2012, Stateline: “More than $26 billion in lingering debt and billions in mounting interest have forced a number of states to scale back unemployment benefits, raise taxes, tap general funds and even turn to the private bond market as they look to shore up unemployment insurance trust funds that plunged into the red during the Great Recession. And now, years removed from the depth of the crisis, there’s concern that some of funds are being refilled so slowly – if at all – that certain states could be in an even worse position when the next downturn comes, compounding a problem that’s plagued them for years…”
UN World Hunger Figures
UN revises world hunger figures, blames flawed method, data for faulty 1 billion estimate, Associated Press, October 9, 2012, Washington Post: “The United Nations said Tuesday its 2009 headline-grabbing announcement that 1 billion people in the world were hungry was off-target and that the number is actually more like 870 million. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization blamed flawed methodology and poor data for the bum projection, and said it now uses a much more accurate set of parameters and statistics to calculate its annual estimate of the world’s hungry. FAO issued its 2012 state of food insecurity report on Tuesday, and its core point was to set the record straight about the number of the world’s undernourished people, applying the more accurate data retroactively to 1990. And the good news, FAO said, is that the number of hungry people has actually been declining steadily — rather than increasing — over the past two decades, although progress has slowed since the 2007-2008 food crises and the global economic downturn…”