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The Dow just hit a record high, corporate profits are soaring—and you’re struggling. Here’s the dirty secret of the jobless recovery.

"Jobs vs. climate action is a straw man—a false and outdated dichotomy propagated by those with a vested interest in the status quo."

— writes Mother Jones’ editors in chief.

An Itsy Bitsy $716 Billion Medicare Q&A

From Kevin Drum:

Mitt Romney says that Obamacare cut $716 billion in Medicare spending. Is that true?

Yes it is. This is the most recent estimate from the CBO for the ten-year period from 2013-2022.

So seniors are getting screwed?

No, probably not.

Then who is?

Mostly hospitals and insurance companies.

How so?…

Read the whole thing here. Knowledge!

4 Ways That Democrats Want to Cut Taxes on the Rich →

It’s not all good in the hood, folks. MJ’s Josh Harkinson peeks underneath the covers.

"Everyone Only Wants Temps" →

timekiller-s:

Gabriel Thompson reports for Mother Jones on a temp agency chain — an example of a “growth industry” that “provides warm bodies for grunt work that pays minimum wage or thereabouts.” In short, it’s brutal. The story was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, where there are even more disturbing stories about economic injustice in the New Gilded Age.

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By the end of the work day I’m exhausted and dirty…Back at the Labor Ready office, I have to wait nearly 30 minutes to receive my check. The job paid $8 an hour—minimum wage. For five hours of labor, I get $37.34 after taxes. I am not paid, however, for the four hours on call, or the time spent in transit to and from the job site, or waiting to get paid. None of this meets the legal definition of wage theft, but it sure feels like it.

“Everyone Only Wants Temps,” in which our reporter signs up with this economy’s employer of last resort.

“GET A JOB”: DIALOGUE BETWEEN A CONSERVATIVE CONGRESSMAN AND A VOTER ON THE MINIMUM WAGE

VOTER TO REP. C.W. BILL YOUNG (R-FLA.): Jesse Jackson Jr. is passing around a bill to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour. Would you support that?

REP. YOUNG: “Probably not.”

VOTER: “It’s $10 bucks an hour. It would give us a living wage.”

YOUNG: “How about getting a job. Why do you want that benefit? Get a job.”

VOTER: “I have a job, but it’s not enough to get by on.”

(YOUNG WALKS AWAY)

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Will Obamacare wreck the economy, as conservatives argue?

Here’s what the Dow has done today, the day the Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Healthcare Act constitutional.

Also, here’s what ACA will do for you.

(via Bloomberg’s Jake Beckman)

Update: Jake tweets us to say: “Thanks for crediting me, but stocks have been down all day. Rebound likely due to Europe, not SCOTUS… you clearly tried to imply that the Dow’s rebound since 3pm is because of health care. It isn’t.”

Point well taken - far too much can be made of charts like these. What we meant to imply is that there wasn’t a plunge related to the ACA, as some critics have predicted. (We also suspect the announcement that JPMorgan’s bad investments may tally up to $9 billion will help keep bank stocks in a negative attitude for a while.) But Jake correctly calls us out for implying that SCOTUS boosted stocks. Mea culpa.

UPDATE #2: After talking with people far less innumerate than us, we’ll readily admit we goofed on this analysis. For a full rundown of what really happened in markets today, and some excellent brain expansion, check out our updated post with more illustrative charts. Meantime, we’ll keep this one online so’s our original missteps don’t fall down a memory hole.

Chart du jour: More than half of all recent high school grads who didn’t go to college are unemployed. Kevin Drum calls it “a staggering waste of human potential.” We wouldn’t argue with that.

"Back before the housing bubble burst, sending America’s economy into a tailspin, hedge fund manager and former CitiGroup banker Bruce Rose was marketing himself as the guy who single-handedly invented subprime mortgage-backed securities. Indeed, Carrington Investment Partners, part of a cluster of related companies founded by Rose, competed with the big investment banks to package and sell mortgage debt to investors. Now Rose and his companies are positioning themselves to feed off the tail end of the meltdown their business practices helped create, joining a foreclosure-to-rental trend that experts say could hurt homeowners even more."

— This, via Josh Harkinson, is your morning must-read.

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Kevin Drum sums up today’s jobs report: “[I]t’s only one month, but it sure looks like we’re living through an economy that just can’t quite pull itself into a serious recovery.” Happy Friday!

Chart of the Day: Low-income people care about jobs. High-income voters care about the deficit. Guess which one Congress cares about?

What's happening in the Persian Gulf explained. →

Iran is talking tough, America is scrambling the aircraft carriers, and the world economy’s bobbing like a drunken sailor. Here’s everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask - from what it means to you, to how it relates to some mysterious explosions in Iran.

"For some time, I’d been hearing stories from my sources in the interstate marijuana racket about law-abiding “civilians” turning to the game because of the recession, and so, armed with introductions, I hit the road to meet some of these unlikely criminals face to face. That’s how, on a hot evening in June, I found myself in Dan’s Northern California kitchen."

— Family, kids, minivan—and drug dealing. In our November/December issue, Tony D’Souza explains how the recession has driven average Americans into the game.

The Way We Live Now: Debtors’ Prisons are making a comeback, reports Kevin Drum. When did the 21st century turn into a bad Dickens novel?