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Unemployment at 7.3% was lower in Rochester, New York, in October 2011, than the 9% in the U.S. Entrepeneurial activity has taken the place of jobs with large corporations, as Kodak has seen job declines that are severe- from about 55,000 in 1980 to less than 10,000 today. Xerox and Baush & Lomb also have downsized, and are down to half of the employees they had in the 1980's. Former Kodak engineers now work for smaller companies doing pioneering work in medical and other fields. The result is smaller incomes- average income in Rochester was $47,333 compared to $66,327 in New York state and $55,739 in the U.S., according to the Center for Governmental Research.

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This report by Martin in the NYT points out that Ohio no longer plays a critical role in U.S. presidential elections. It was critical for a Bush win over Gore, and president Obama carried it by 2 points against Romney in 2012. It is critical for Trump to win. For Hillary Clinton other states are gaining importance as they better reflect the demographic changes in the U.S. and the mix with minorities- states such as Georgia, N. Carolina, Colorado and Florida. Ohio has not seen an influx of Hispanics as other states, and is now more white, more evangelical voters, and reflects a mix that was prevalent earlier. 

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Krugman says the the higher population growth in Texas has led to higher job growth there relative to the rest of the country. Other factors mitigating the effects of the recession in Texas- the housing and mortgage lending laws in Texas prevented the building up of home equity debt and foreclosures that hit other states, and the oil industry in Texas helped with higher oil prices. Lower wages in Texas, lower living costs, and lower housing costs have attracted jobs to the state. In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2%, lower than California and close to that of New York.

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Douthat says the record of Texas in jobs, in education, in minority achievement, in rising wages, and in preventing a real estate bubble is genuine and needs to be respected. He is uncertain as to how much of this is a result of Rick Perry's leadership in the state.

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The Potential Gas Committee 2013 report showing the U.S. has 2384 trillion cubic feet of natural gas resources. The report did not identify the resources that can be extracted at a reasonable cost. This figure is 90 times the gas used in the U.S. in 2012, and about 26% higher than a report by the same industry group in 2010. About 20 companies have applied for permits to export liqufied natural gas from the U.S. to other countries.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel describes the problems with media coverage in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, where what dominated she says was fake news, fake coverage, and misinformation, failure to adhere to the American values that would censure any denigration of women, and failure to cover the critical issues of how the election would affect the economy, the middle and working class.  She points out that the election of a first female president was not treated with the same respect that the election of a first black person as president was. 

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Sara Ehrman describes the time when Hillary Clinton worked in Washington D.C. as a 26 year old lawyer working on the Watergate committee, and Bill Clinton was teaching law in Arkansas. In August 1974 Hillary was living for about 1 year with Mrs. Ehrman, a friend who was a congressional aide at the time. She is 97 today, and recalls that time when she tried to discourage Hillary from going to Arkansas to join her boyfriend. Ehrman felt not much would come out of Bill Clinton, though she thought him to be handsome, and later worked in his presidential campaign and Hillary's presidential campaign. Ehrman was 55 then, and describes Hillary Clinton as a bit sloppy in her habits, such as not making her bed and having a lot of stuff strewn about her room, but really intelligent and very hardworking. At the time both lived together. Ehrman describes a daily routine of seeing Hillary go to work with coffee in the morning and come back exhausted late at night, having yogurt and going to bed, day after day.  The two met for the first time in 1972 when Ehrman was co-director of issues and research in the McGovern campaign in Texas, and Hillary was helping with voter registration. This report describes in detail the road trip to Arkansas that the two made together, when Mrs. Ehrman drove Hillary to Arkansas in her old Buick. They stopped at small towns  in the 1200 mile journey, and this journey ends with Mrs Ehrman crying that she could not get Hillary to change her mind about Bill Clinton and Arkansas. About what she thought was a bright woman throwing her life away in the deep South of the seventies. Hillary she remembers insisted she loved Bill Clinton, and having passed the Arkansas Bar exam had firmly decided on settling in Arkansas. ...

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Austin, Texas and growth in "middle skill" jobs which offers ways to increase jobs growth in the U.S. in 2012-2015.

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A Sept 2012 Census Bureau report shows the median income of a typical U.S. family declined or was flat in almost all states in 2011. Median household income declined in Nevada by 6%, in California by 3.8%. In Arizona and Florida incomes declined by 2.9%. For the U.S. median income declined by 1.3% to $50,502 in 2011. Poverty continues to increase, with California showing 335,760 people falling into annual income levels below $23,021 for a family of four in 2011, giving the state a 16.6% poverty rate.

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Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist points out an astonishing fact about the 2016 U.S. presidential election- U.S. television networks nightly news devoted only 32 minutes in 2016 to all policy issues combined. And these networks devoted 100 minutes to Clinton emails. He calls this "disgraceful."  For weeks at a time in September and October the main television networks lacked the integrity and courage to ask questions and persist on the major questions facing the country of the economy, correcting income distribution that has been skewed away from the middle and working class, infrastructure rebuilding, education and healthcare, and what the policy proposals of each candidate would do for the country. Krugman does not mention this but the media devoted hardly any time to the economic plan devised by Trump that respected economists and economic analysis showed would increase the deficit by $5.3 trillion, and lead to a short term temporary increase in growth followed by a sharp decline. The worst thing that could happen to middle and working class families struggling to recover from the blow to their finances from the last recession.  The cyber hacking of a U.S. presidential election by a foreign power never received the unanimous rejection that it deserved from the television networks, not just Fox News as Krugman points out, but by all the networks. The future landscape of the media needs assessment to bring in new ideas and new entrants to bring constructive improvements, and for older media organizations to rebuild after the loss of confidence among young people. Only about a quarter of young people in the U.S. have confidence in the large media organizations news coverage according to surveys done recently. There are other pressures coming from the tech world that make it imperative to do this. Many experts point to the destructive effect of social media in spreading rumors or information disguised as facts, which are spread instantly by Twitter and Facebook, without any obligation to check the facts. This is also dangerous with a public that is now divided between better educated and less educated along political lines, older more settled in their views people, and younger people quicker in looking for the facts and checking things out before believing them. ...

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The Black teen jobless rate in 2011, the third year of the Obama administration- a shocking 46.5%!

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Fletcher cites statistics from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that between December 2007 and June 2010, private sector employment in Texas went down by 0.6%. During that period public sector jobs increased by 6.4%. Government employees make up about 17% of the workforce in Texas. The Texas economy gets a large amount of federal money because of military installations and NASA- $227 billion in 2009, according to the Census Bureau. By comparison California received $346 billon in 2009. During the recession period after the global financial crisis of 2008, Texas received $25 billion in stimulus money. Richard Fisher of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank acknowleges the federal money going into Texas, yet he points out the driving force in the economy of Texas is still the private sector. For the private sector there are several advantages to being in Texas. There are lower taxes- no state income tax and lower business taxes. The large supply of land for development and few land-use restrictions make development easier. Corporate efficiency was a key advantage cited by Fluor when it moved from Orange County, California to Texas. A growing energy sector has helped, along with the growing trade with Mexico. The housing regulations in the state have acted as a check on housing prices, and left Texas with less of the detrimental effects of the housing mortgage crisis than the rest of the nation, especially California and Florida. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, says he is not against all regulation, and the kind of housing regulation in Texas certainly has played a good role for Texas. Perry's tort reforms have reduced the legal burden on business prevalent in the rest of the U.S....

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The growth in U.S. GDP was 1.7 % in 2011, yet unemployment dropped by 0.7% in the last 12 months to 8.3% by Feb. 2012. A pickup in hiring is seen in job figures. Christina Romer gives as an explanation to the rise in unemployment in 2009 to 10%, more than expected, and the drop since then, to the overreaction of companies to the financial crisis by laying off workers and freezing hiring- with hiring picking up as conditions return to normal levels. The unemployment rate as defined is also not an accurate measure of the jobs situation, as it reflects only workers who are looking for work, and many workers drop out of the jobs market when they are discouraged especially the long term unemployed. Taking into account people who have dropped out of the labor markets the unemployment rate was 11% in Nov. 2009, according to Luce in the Financial Times- in Ezra Klein, Washington Post 12/12/2011, Wonkbook: Real unemployment rate 11%. Lawrence Katz, Harvard Labor economist also cites this as one of three jobs crises in unemployment today that need to be addressed, the other two being: foreclosures and debt, and the low number of jobs added because of automated manufacturing- in Friedman, NYT, 12/10/11, The Next First 100 Days. Explanations for the low GDP growth as unemployment declines is a likely productivity slowdown. Prof. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, sees a slowdown in productivity. Worker output for every hour worked, how productivity is measured, increased only 0.4% in 2011 and 0.9% in the last 7 quarters, and is trending downward in the longer term. A more likely explanation is that unemployment is still at higher levels but is understated in unemployment figures....

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The unemployment rate in the U.S. state of Ohio drops to 7.2% in June 2012 from 10.6% in the second half of 2009. But polls show two thirds of the respondents see the economy as being worse or the same as in 2011. Because of lower wages in some industries such as auto manufacturing which are reviving there appears to be a lowering of incomes and expectations.