The Bush Economic Miracle Continues To Devastate America

The Bush Economic Miracle will keep making magic for America's working families long after Bush has slithered off to Preston Hollow and political obscurity. This morning the Labor Department reported that new claims for unemployment benefits reached their highest level in 26 years last week. And they'll be going much higher before whatever ameliorative policies Obama can put in place take effect.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial applications for jobless benefits in the week ending Dec. 6 rose to a seasonally adjusted 573,000 from an upwardly revised figure of 515,000 in the previous week. That was far more than the 525,000 claims Wall Street economists expected... The number of people continuing to claim jobless benefits also jumped much more than expected, increasing by 338,000 to 4.4 million. Economists expected a small increase to 4.1 million.

Among the large employers announcing layoffs this week were Dow Chemical, 3M, Anheuser-Busch, National Public Radio and the National Football League. The bankster-induced financial crisis and housing collapse "have sharply reduced household wealth as stock prices and home values have declined" and this has led, inevitably, to consumers and businesses cutting back on spending. And the foreclosure crisis is going to get much worse.

U.S. foreclosure filings climbed 28 percent in November from a year earlier and a brewing “storm” of new defaults and job losses may force 1 million homeowners from their properties next year, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

A total of 259,085 properties got a default notice, were warned of a pending auction or were foreclosed on last month, the seller of default data said in a report today. That’s the fewest since June. Filings fell 7 percent from October as state laws and lender programs designed to delay the foreclosure process allowed delinquent borrowers to stay in their homes.

“We’re going to see a pretty significant storm next year,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of marketing for Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac, said in an interview. “There are two or three clouds that suggest a pretty heavy downpour.”

Rising unemployment, expiring foreclosure moratoriums and state efforts that “run out of steam” will push monthly filings toward the record of more than 303,000 set in August, Sharga said. The number of homes that revert to lenders, the last stage of foreclosure and known as “real estate owned” or REO properties, will increase to 1 million from as many as 880,000 this year, he said.

States with the worst problems: Nevada, Florida, California, Michigan, Georgia (where many voters are so obsessed with hatred and bigotry and their own abject ignorance that they just re-elected one of the authors of their suffering, someone who ran on a platform of "more of the same"), Ohio, Illinois, Virginia and Texas. Utah and Idaho also had startlingly high rates of foreclosure filings but... well, Mormons plan to become gods and go live on another planet anyway: