Karen Dalton-Beninato: New Orleans Dispatch for The New Republic: Isaac is Not Katrina
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com - Tuesday, August 28, 2012
I walked down Royal Street this afternoon as Hurricane Isaac approached, with my husband photographing boarded up windows, a platoon of Humvees, and an abandoned bra lying in the street. Everyone's getting in on the live coverage action. Al Roker tweeted a picture of a rosy but abandoned Cafe Du Monde; Anderson Cooper Instagrammed the sunset. Meteorologists are at the lakefront, their jackets whipping around in the wind that's projected to reach 80 miles an hour by this morning. A dog and an utter moron are swimming in waves lapping at the New Orleans hurricane levee. Isaac is not Katrina : we've been repeating that like a mantra all week. That it'll hit on the same calendar date seven years later is just a stupid coincidence. For one, this hurricane isn't supposed to be as strong. We're also receiving all sorts of assurance from the Army Corps of Engineers about how reliable the levees are, though we were hoping for more time to test them. (Slideshow below, and full article at The New Republic .) > Photos by Jeff Beninato
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Robert Naiman: Romney-Ryan "Ploughshares to Swords" Budget Would Cost America At Least 530,000 Jobs
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com - Thursday, August 23, 2012
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to cut domestic spending in order to increase military spending. Regardless of whatever else may be true -- that is, regardless of whether you think more military spending is otherwise a good idea, or how you feel about the public services that would be axed by greater domestic cuts -- their plans to cut domestic spending in order to increase military spending would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs. How many jobs? A plausible estimate is that their plans to cut domestic spending in order to increase military spending would cost at least 530,000 jobs. What does 530,000 jobs mean in the context of the U.S. economy? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently about 12.8 million unemployed out of a labor force of about 155 million, for a measured unemployment rate of 8.3 percent. If an additional 500,000 people were employed today, there would be 12.3 million unemployed and the unemployment rate would be 8 percent. By comparison, in September 2011, economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics estimated that if two stimulus measures were allowed to expire at the end of 2011 -- the 2 percent employee payroll tax holiday and the emergency unemployment insurance program -- that would cost 750,000 jobs in 2012. As you may recall, there was a huge fight about whether those two stimulus measures should be allowed to expire. The job loss from replacing military cuts with domestic cu
