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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3 days3D
The U.S. economy has added more than two million jobs over the past year. But more people who are out of work are having a hard time getting back in. As of November, more than seven million Americans were unemployed, meaning they didn’t have work and were trying to find it. More than 1.6 million of those jobless workers had been job hunting for at least six months, according to the Labor Department. The number of people searching for that long is up more than 50% since the end of 2022. On average, it now takes people about six months to find a job, roughly a month longer than it did during the postpandemic hiring boom in early 2023, according to the Labor Department. The pain is largely in high-paying white-collar jobs, including in tech, law and media, where businesses grew fast when the economy reopened from the pandemic but now have less need for new hires. A labor market that looks healthy in the headlines is, under the surface, weaker than it seems. The unemployment rate, at 4.2%, remains well below the average during the decade before the pandemic. But there is now just about one job posting per unemployed worker, down from two in early 2022. Strong hiring has narrowed to a thin set of industries. The government’s monthly jobs report on Friday will provide another snapshot of the market’s health. More people getting unemployment benefits are drawing on public aid longer. New data released last week from the Labor Department show that 1.8 million people continued to file for previously granted unemployment benefits as of late December, near the postpandemic high.Year-over-year wage growth has fallen to 4%, down from about 6% at the height of the early 2020s hiring spree. That’s a sign that many employers don’t have to jostle so hard to attract workers. To date, the labor market has been weakening primarily due to less hiring—not widespread layoffs. But once companies decide to reduce payrolls, job cuts often snowball quickly, which could spark a much faster jump in the unemployment rate, said Veronica Clark, a Citigroup economist.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3wks3W
The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to a defense policy bill directing $895 billion toward the Pentagon and other military activities, moving over the objections of some Democrats who opposed a provision added late in the negotiations that would deny coverage for transgender health procedures for minors.The 85-to-14 vote, coming a week after a divided House passed the same measure, cleared the bill for President Biden’s signature.Most Republicans and many Democrats supported the measure, which provides a 14.5 percent pay raise to junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It also expands access to meal assistance, housing and child care programs that benefit those in uniform.But several Democrats withheld their backing in protest of a provision preventing TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for service members, from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for children under 18.The language, which would affect the gender-transitioning children of service members, was recently added to the measure at the insistence of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who refused to bring a defense bill to the House floor without it, according to aides familiar with the negotiations.Twenty-one Democrats, led by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment to strip the provision from the bill, but the matter was never brought to a vote. Several of them took to the floor on Tuesday to lodge their objections.“It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families,” Ms. Baldwin said, estimating that the provision could negatively affect as many as 6,000 to 7,000 military families.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”Mr. Trump added that Mr. Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been a particular target for Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.During his run for governor, Mr. Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.
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TOM COTTON is slated to be the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting “I think mass deportation is just talk, but the era of open borders will be over,” Scott McConnell, a co-founder of The American Conservative, wrote on X. In July a Mexican-born Trump backer told The Times, “Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?”Now the answer is taking shape: He’s going to oversee a militarized mass roundup of the undocumented. On Sunday, Trump named Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar.”In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D
The Los Angeles Fire Department had its budget cut by a staggering $17.6 million this financial year, records show — as fire crews continue to battle out-of-control blazes ravaging the City of Angels.The drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second-largest cut to come out of embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass‘ 2024-25 fiscal year budget, according to city figures.The police budget, meanwhile, increased by $126 million, a graphic shared by LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia shows.Bass had initially wanted to cut the fire department by even more — a staggering $23 million.The details on Bass’ budget slashing resurfaced as the mayor faced widespread backlash Wednesday after it was revealed she was away in Africa for the Ghana president’s inauguration — even as wind-whipped wildfires turned parts of her city into an apocalyptic hellscape.In her absence, Bass found time to praise firefighters and other emergency crews for working “overnight to protect Angelenos affected by fires.”“Angelenos should be advised that the windstorm is expected to worsen through the morning and to heed local warnings, stay vigilant and stay safe,” Bass said in a post on X.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…9hrs9H
The glut of homes in increasingly fire-prone places has created an insurance crisis in California, with many big insurers pulling out of the state to avoid more losses. Nearly 500,000 Californians have turned to the state’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which has doubled in size over the past five years. The state is now exposed to nearly $458 billion in potential damage, a figure that has nearly tripled since 2020.The neighborhoods in the path of the Palisades and other fires burning this week have been among some of the hardest-hit by insurer defections in recent years. The 90272 ZIP code of Pacific Palisades experienced 1,930 policy non-renewals between 2019 and 2024, according to a San Francisco Chronicle tally, or 28 out of every 100 policies.Pacific Palisades is also the state’s fifth-largest user of FAIR policies, with nearly $6 billion in exposure. Even a fraction of that amount would exceed the capabilities of FAIR, which at last report had about $700 million in cash. Additional damage can be passed on to private insurers, which would pass those costs immediately to their less-risky customers.California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara last month announced policy tweaks to encourage insurers to come back to the state. They can now use catastrophe modeling to set rates after long being required to consider only historic losses. But part of their modeling must also include fire-defense measures property owners take. Insurers can also now pass the cost of reinsurance on to their customers. Providers lured back to the state by these incentives must cover risky areas at a rate of 85% of their statewide market share.
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