North Carolinians signing up for subsidized health insurance at the last minute has put the state at the fifth highest in the U.S. for enrollees. The tens of thousands who signed up in the last few weeks of eligibility pushed us to about 357,000 enrollees – a high number, especially for a Republican-controlled state.
In unrelated but equally good news, about 288,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in April, pushing the unemployment rate to the lowest it’s been since September 2008. The unemployment rate sits at 6.3 percent.
The drugs that were intended to execute Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett didn’t enter his system properly; the vein being used collapsed. The botched process resulted in Lockett convulsing in his chair before being pronounced dead minutes later of a heart attack. Prison officials are now asking the state to review the execution process.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray proposed increasing the minimum wage to $15 for municipal workers in the city. His announcement came shortly after Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked a bill that would have gradually raised the federal minimum wage. “If the City Council agrees, Murray said, Seattle will prove itself to be ‘an incubator of democracy,’ leading the national conversation to address ‘the growing problem of income inequality.'”
The five things that cause two-thirds of deaths in the U.S.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2014.
For our friends on the right, at all levels, who still subscribe to the self serving delusion that wealth “trickles down” from rich people to the “little people”:
China, the country that is doing all our manufacturing, is about to pass the USA as the worlds biggest economy. It seems like all those jobs are causing wealth to flow UP to the owners of their businesses and ours. That, of course, explains why our rich people are getting richer while our middle class people are getting poorer.
I have noticed that most people who are against increasing the minimum wage don’t work for any amount even close to that wage, and are more worried about the prices that THEY pay for products than whether or not the people who sell them those products can afford to shop where they work.
Does ANYONE at CL know how to properly interpret employment statistics? This latest jobs report was ANYTHING but “good news”.
From a joint CBS/Associated Press report:
WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Despite the unemployment rate plummeting, more than 92 million Americans remain out of the labor force.
The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.7 percent in March, the lowest it has been since September 2008 when it was 6.1 percent. The sharp drop, though, occurred because the number of people working or seeking work fell. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count people not looking for a job as unemployed.
The bureau noted that the civilian labor force dropped by 806,000 last month.
The amount of Americans not in the labor force in April rose to 92,594,000, almost 1 million more than the previous month.