It’s Friday, and it’s time for another report showing rising unemployment. The nation lost 663,000 jobs in March, the fourth straight month in which job losses have topped 600,000. As a result, the unemployment rate jumped from 8.1 to 8.5 percent, the highest rate since 1983.
Wichita has had its own bad employment news this week, as Cessna Aircraft and Bombardier Aerospace announced more layoffs.
Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Paul Krugman is getting a lot of attention for criticizing the Obama administration’s bank bailout, even showing up on the cover of Newsweek. But he sounded on board with the president’s goal of health care reform Sunday on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “When you look at the long-run budget problem, it’s a health care problem,” Krugman said. “Demography, aging of the population, is a manageable-size issue. Rising health care costs is totally unmanageable. So (Obama) can’t control Medicare and Medicaid unless there’s control of health care costs, and most people think that has to be a comprehensive health care reform. So health care reform is . . . his version of Social Security for FDR, and it’s the only way that you can possibly get the federal budget under control.”
“Everything that we have been doing to cure the climate change problem has been wrong, because what we have been doing is depending upon politicians — like me — when, in fact, the only real answer is in science,” Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson said during a speech this week on climate change policy at the University of Kansas.
Parkinson said that scientists need to create more efficient energy grids and search for more efficient renewable-energy sources, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. But politicians can help, he said, by encouraging conservation and spurring innovation. They also can avoid making the problem worse, which is what will happen in Kansas if lawmakers force approval of two new coal-fired power plants near Holcomb.
“Just a few weeks after President Obama named Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his Health and Human Services nominee, she now reveals she owes over $7,000 in back taxes. Another one owes. See, that’s the difference between the two political parties right there. Republicans believe in no new taxes. Democrats believe in no old ones.” — Jay Leno
“Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, asked President Obama if he ever played darts. And Obama said: ‘Sure I play darts. How do you think I picked my Cabinet?’” — David Letterman
“President Obama announced he is using his own money to redecorate the White House. Meanwhile, he is using taxpayers’ money to redecorate the houses of AIG executives.” — Craig Ferguson
