Big new building. Bureaucrats hope to be like a gas, to expand to occupy the space available. But there's news of a State income shortfall, (see also, here), and aid to other units of government will likely be curtailed while the housing slump has property values down to where some may be over-assesssed, and in need of downward adjustment. That building may have to end up almost as empty overall as the big ramp next door.Then there is this - the private sector is shrinking out jobs in order to survive the hard times. How can government be different, as if immune to fiscal realities? When the housing starts are down fewer inspectors are needed, as at the stalled Ramsey Town Center. With regard to private sector jobs, PiPress carries a NY Times feed, which reports:
Jobless report masks real, even worse stats
1.2 million more quit searching or want more work
By David Leonhardt and Catherine Rampell
New York Times - Updated: 12/06/2008 12:39:35 AM CST
As bad as the headline numbers in Friday's employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.
The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half-million jobs, the Labor Department said Friday.
Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government's best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.
The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they neither were working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all of whom were counted as fully employed — rose by another 621,000.
Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. And it is still deteriorating rapidly.
Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, something that has not happened since the Labor Department began keeping figures in the 1940s.
In a note to clients, Morgan Stanley economists wrote, "Quite simply, there was nothing good in this report." HSBC forecasters said they now expect the Federal Reserve to reduce its benchmark interest rate all the way to zero.
Such language may sound out of step with a jobless rate that, despite its recent rise, remains at 6.7 percent; the rate exceeded 10 percent in the early 1980s. But over the last few decades, the jobless rate has become a significantly less useful measure of the country's economic health.
That is because far more people fall into the gray area of the labor market — not having a job and not looking for one, but interested in working — than in the past. This group includes many former factory workers who have been unable to find new work that pays nearly as well and unwilling to accept a job that pays much less. Some get by with help from disability payments, while others rely on their spouses' paychecks.
For much of the last year, the ranks of these labor force dropouts were not changing rapidly, said Thomas Nardone, a Labor Department economist who oversees the collection of the unemployment data. People who had lost their jobs generally began looking for new work. But that changed in November.
"It's not only that there's nothing out there," said Lorena Garcia, an organizer in Denver for 9to5, National Association of Working Women, a group that helps low-wage women and women who are looking for work. "But it also costs money to job hunt."
That's an excerpt and there's more detail if you link over and read the item. It is the source of this image, where you can note the bottom data, job drops for November being the highest in decades.
In the heady days of the housing bubble during the James Norman tenure at City Hall, there was the groundbreaking for the big new building by the ramp - costing millions, to be paid off a little each year, with annual debt service reported to now be over a million a year. While the council faces change there will be no job losses, the number will stay the same unless wards are scrapped and Ramsey goes back to five at large seats, a mayor and four others. Those heady and complacent "we're in fat city with no downside" days are passed, and the City of Ramsey will have to adjust to the realities. I remember a few meetings broadcast during the past year even, when payroll was being expanded, with only one or two council members questioning it. Times must change.