If you follow current events, read the newspaper, or watch the nightly news (and if you don’t I will give them to you here) you hear all sorts of numbers regarding the economy from unemployment, inflation, GDP, etc. What do they all mean for the economy going forward?

First lets look at some of the numbers:

Inflation: 3.3% through November 2011 (using the CPI)
Unemployment: 8.5% through December 2011
GDP Growth: 1.8% in Quarter 3

Unemployment

We have seen unemployment fall from 9.1% in July to 8.5% in December. Though it is encouraging to see the unemployment rate fall slightly, 8.5% is still a very high number. It is difficult to say if this drop in the unemployment rate is due to seasonal hiring for the holiday season or if people continue to leave the labor force. The following graph shows labor force participation and you can see the decline in the last 2 years…

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Want to see how “the 1%” lives? Join us on Tuesday for a walking tour of the homes of some of the bank and corporate executives that don’t pay taxes, cut jobs, engaged in mortgage fraud, tanked our economy… all while giving themselves record setting bonuses!

We’ll be meeting at 59th Street and 5th Avenue at 12:30 pm, and then march from house to house, demanding accountability for Wall Street crimes, and an extension of the Millionaire’s tax. (The tour is being arranged by Beyond May 12, the group that organized the Community & Labor March to Wall Street on October 5th.) All are welcome.

Who will we be visiting exactly? Well… you’re just going to have to come and find out. To sign up for the tour and receive updated infor- mation please visit The Billionaire’s Tour event page on Facebook. Live updates on Twitter via @BeyondMay12.

The long-term unemployed and Gregg Rosen, the co-founder of the recently-formed American 99ers Union, got respect from FOX News on Saturday night. And set a precedent in becoming the first representative of the 99er community to be invited on the right-wing media outlet.

In the 3-minute interview Rosen, a 42-year-old former sales and marketing manager from Pennsylvania, expressed the reason the growing number of unemployed need an additional unemployment extension, and why the nation’s economy would benefit from from their restored buying power. “If you put money back into the hands of millions of Americans, who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, allow them to invest back into the economy, what’s going to happen? You’re going to see consumer spending go up; in turn, you’re going to see consumer confidence rise among those individuals who are working, which means that they’re going to start spending more. Based on the laws of supply and demand, what happens when the demand starts to put a strain on the suppliers? They have to expand. What does that equal? Job creation!”

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