A number of items all of which are indicative of the underachievement characterizing Obamanomics:

Jobs, jobs, jobs: missing in action.
Private sector sheds 39,000 jobs in September

Private employers unexpectedly cut 39,000 jobs in September after an upwardly revised gain of 10,000 in August, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

That’s OK. Consumer spending will keep things going…right? Ooops!
Middle Class Slams Brakes on Spending

Middle-class Americans made their deepest spending cuts in more than two decades, slashing spending on such discretionary items as restaurant meals and alcohol during the recession.

Households in the middle fifth of the population sliced their average annual spending to $41,150 in 2009, the Labor Department said Tuesday in its annual spending breakdown. That was down 3.1% from 2007 and 3.5% from 2008, the steepest one-year drop since records began in 1984. The drop came even as those households’ after-tax income remained relatively stable over the two years, at an average $45,199.

Looks like folks thing the prudent thing to do given current conditions is to hold onto more cash for…who knows what the B.O. administration will do next…but that’s OK, the poor are doing better now under Obamanomics. Aren’t they?

Meanwhile, the poorest Americans spent more as prices for necessities like food and rental housing climbed. Spending rose 5.6% from 2007 to 2009 for the poorest fifth of consumers, the most of any other income group, despite a 5.5% drop in after-tax income to an average $9,956 a household. In some cases, elderly people and others with low incomes dipped into savings or relied on credit to get by.

“What you’re looking at here is people at the bottom trying to hang on,” said Timothy Smeeding, public affairs professor and director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “You can’t go below a certain level.”

Expenses up, income down. How’d that “Summer of Recovery” thing turn out? Apparently not so hot, which leads to…:

Food Stamp Recipients at Record 41.8 Million Americans in July, U.S. Says

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 41.8 million in July as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government said.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 18 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.4 percent from June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 20 straight months.

Unemployment in September may have reached 9.7 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the release of last month’s rate on Oct. 8. Unemployment was 9.6 percent in July, near levels last seen in 1983.

A bit of a time lag to compile the stats, but the picture is unmistakable.
But hey, at least the TARP and other bailouts have the big financial guys looking up now…or not.

Goldman Sachs Says U.S. Economy May Be `Fairly Bad’

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said the U.S. economy is likely to be “fairly bad” or “very bad” over the next six to nine months.

“We see two main scenarios,” analysts led by Jan Hatzius, the New York-based chief U.S. economist at the company, wrote in an e-mail to clients. “A fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a 1 1/2 percent to 2 percent rate through the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to 10 percent, and a very bad one in which the economy returns to an outright recession.”

Doesn’t look like the financial capital of the world will lead us out of the economic mire, either:

New Yorkers’ Income Falls for 1st Time in 70 Years+

The recession put a 3.1 percent dent in the personal incomes of New York state residents, who endured their first full-year decline in more than 70 years, according to a report released Tuesday.

Paychecks or net earnings tumbled 5.4 percent, while dividends, interest and rent slid 8.4 percent, to a grand total of nearly $908 billion, the state comptroller’s report said.

Not only did New Yorkers’ personal incomes fall “almost twice” as much as they did in the nation as a whole, but they have yet to recover to pre-recession levels, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said.

The drop occurred even though the job-destroying recession was milder in New York than in the rest of the country.

Hmmm 70 years. That goes back to 1940, just before WW-II finally bailed the country out of the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, it’s 27 days until election day….