By Mark Thoma

There was something important missing from both the Democrat and Republican National Conventions -- the unemployed. We have an unemployment crisis on our hands, and nobody should be satisfied with an unemployment rate in excess of 8 percent and the slow decline in unemployment we have experienced. Yet we heard very little about plans to address the jobs crisis at the conventions, and it's the same on the campaign trail.

I didn't expect the Republicans to say much about the unemployed, except to criticize the president over the slow progress in bringing the number down. The deficit was their convention focus, including the debt clock above the stage, but it is telling that they have little to offer the unemployed beyond criticism of President Obama.

 

By Sheryl Nance-Nash

Elderly homeowners signing up for reverse mortgages might be latest victims of the housing crisis.

A reverse mortgage allows homeowners 62 and older who own their homes outright or who have low mortgage balances to get cash by borrowing against the equity in their homes. The mortgage comes due when the borrower dies, moves or sells the home – often shifting the responsibility to family members or heirs.

"Reverse mortgages have increased over the past five years. Many retirees, having experienced massive retirement income loss, due to the current state of the economy, have resulted to reverse mortgages as a financial refuge," says J. Varney Barker, author of New Rules of Home Ownership for the 21st Century.

 

By Kimberly Palmer

 

There are many reasons middle-class Americans feel squeezed right now: The high unemployment rate (8.1 percent), rising cost of college tuition, or the fact that close to one-third of homeowners are underwater. But it's a combination of three other factors that led the Pew Research Center to label the 2000s a "lost decade" for the middle class: declining household income, shrinking net worth, and a smaller middle class.

 

"Income peaked in 1999 and it has not yet returned to that peak," says Paul Taylor, a coauthor of the report and the executive vice president of the Pew Research Center. "It's the first decade in modern U.S. history where that's the case," he adds.

 

By Rick Newman

 

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a plan to revamp the entire U.S. tax code and change the nature of American capitalism. But he can't tell us what his plan is just yet.

 

Romney has revealed parts of his plan, such as his goal of cutting the tax rate in every bracket by one-fifth, slashing corporate taxes, and cutting government spending. But there are some important policies to be named later.

 

Romney acknowledges that cutting taxes as he proposes would leave the government short of revenue, which would have to be made up somehow. To do that, he says, he'd "limit deductions and exemptions for people at the high end." But which deductions? By how much? And what if those limitations aren't enough to keep the government solvent?

 

To call Friday's U.S. jobs report disappointing may be the understatement of the year.

The economy added a measly 96,000 workers last month after a gain of 141,000 in July, which was revised downward. Unemployment fell slightly to 8.1%. Pitiful. For the rate to decline significantly, the U.S. needs to add at least 250,000 jobs a month over multiple months. About 151,000 jobs per month were created, on average, during the 1980s and 181,000 per month were generated in the following decade, according to a 2005 Federal Reserve research paper.
 

 

By Suzanne McGee

It’s no coincidence that Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren – two high-profile Democratic politicians capable of taking complex financial concepts and boiling them down to terms a non-specialist can readily grasp –– took to the podium at their party’s convention Wednesday night. Their job, in part, was to convince not only party loyalists but also the general public that the current economic picture – call it a jobless recovery, if you will – isn’t something that any president can fix with a snap of his or her fingers. Party spinmeisters have already been touting the 4.5 million private sector jobs added over the last 29 months, but if they work their magic today, it could help President Barack Obama ride out any storm that might follow a disappointing jobs report scheduled to be released tomorrow morning.