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Representative Tsongas is NOT one of us!
Most of us that live in the 37 cities and towns that comprise the 3rd Congressional District would love to be in the stratosphere that is the life style of our Representative”.
In the 2010 Election on a Lowell Sun debate, Ms. Tsongas insinuated that she "was a regular person” and attempted to paint her challenger as an elitist. She also indicated her personal involvement in saving money for us taxpayers. She mentioned not taking a raise and voting for a freeze on a congressional pay raise as well as cutting staff expenses by 75 thousand dollars. Her statement seemed not to be in line with the facts.
Between Jan 1st and 30 July 2010, a six month period, Ms. Tsongas had spent $498.897 for her staff, this projects out to $997,794 for the year! In 2009 her staff expenses were $960,829, In 2008 the expense was $898,711. This does not indicate a reduction but rather a slow increase in the cost to operate her office.
She failed to mention that she voted for the congressional pay raise (H413 on June 19, 2009) before she voted against the automatic pay adjustment in 2010.
On a personal front Ms Tsongas’s income is $174.000 for a congressional salary. Based on Financial Disclosure reports a public record, her net worth is listed as between $1,845,054 and $7,999.999 which ranks her 66th RICHEST in the House of Representatives. Her assets includes her three properties, a small Condo at 52 Lawrence Drive Unit 411M, in Lowell, rarely used other than an election cycle, valued at $119.600. Her primary residence, at 26 Auburn St., Charlestown Ma. Purchased in 2003 for $760,000 with an accessed value of $602,300. And finally her property at 455 Shore Rd. Chatham Ma; valued at $2,440,800.This is the individual who supports Occupy Wall Street and is in fact a FAT CAT!
We personally hope Ms. Tsongas makes and spends whatever she desires, that is the America as it was and should be, not the America she and her fellow elitist elected officials want to make it for us and exclude themselves.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Unemployment- While Tsongas has been in office


Representative Tsongas Repeating The Unemployment Lie;

The last three years have seen some of the highest unemployment rates reported since the Great Depression. The official rate moved from 5 percent in January 2008 to a high of 10.1 percent in October 2009, and a current rate of 8.6 percent. It rests 3 points above the 1948-2007 average of
5.6 percent. Unfortunately, the reality is even worse than these numbers suggest.
To stay in office, there is one thing President Obama and Representative Tsongas should hope for: an improvement in the employment picture before the 2012 elections.
This is because of the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the official unemployment rate. Conceptually the unemployment rate seems simple - it is just the number of unemployed divided by the number of people in the labor force. However, deciding whom to include in the labor force is a complicated task. In the official unemployment rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the labor force as those who are employed or who have actively looked for work within the last four weeks. As a consequence, the official rate excludes workers who have decided to drop out of the labor market altogether because economic conditions have discouraged them, or for other reasons. The official rate also ignores those who settle for part-time work since they are unable to find a full-time job.

So, the way in which we calculate unemployment might mask the actual weakness of our economy. Paradoxically, if pessimism about the economy drives workers to stop looking for work or to settle for a part time job, it could actually cause the official unemployment rate to fall because of a bad outlook.

To compensate for this problem, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published an alternative measure of the unemployment rate based on an analysis of the Current Population Survey, a household survey. This measure, referred to as the "U-6 rate", includes those that would still like a job and have looked for work in the last twelve months, not just the last four weeks. It also includes people who opted to work part-time even though they would like full-time jobs. Unfortunately, this measure is not cited nearly enough.

The U-6 rate offers a clearer picture of how precarious a situation we are in. It has moved from 8.8 percent in December 2007 to 17.4 percent in October 2009 and 15.6 percent in November 2011. Today the gap between the U-6 rate and the official rate is 7 percentage points, meaning that the number damaged by the weak job market is almost twice what the official number would suggest. At the start of the recession, there was only a 3.8 percentage point difference.
By comparison, during the 2001 recession, which lasted only a few months, the difference grew by a meager 0.9 points from 3 percent to 3.9 percent.
For a historical perspective, we obtained data on these two measures going back to 1994. The evidence reveals the gap between the official rate and the U-6 rate has averaged less than 4 percentage points, and has not exceeded 5 percentage points except for the first month in 1994. October 2008 is the first time that the difference exceeded 5 points, and since then has averaged around 7 points. Currently more than 5.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, or an astounding 43 percent of all unemployed. The tremendous increase in long-term unemployment is one factor driving the unprecedented disparity between the official measure of unemployment and the alternative measure. Long-term unemployment has a damaging psychological impact on workers' willingness to keep searching for work and motivates them to accept part-time work. More importantly, however, long-term unemployment has a real impact on their ability to find a job because skills erode and employers tend to recoil from large gaps on a resume.
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