Between the president’s economic power grabs and the Fed chairman’s “quantitative easing” schemes, the future continues to darken for our economic prospects.

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Note: This column originally appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

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If the Congressional mid-terms, gubernatorial races, and various state and local electoral contests result in the large-scale repudiation of the Left so many are expecting, it will represent only the barest of beginnings towards a genuine long-term national economic recovery.

Only now is it beginning to dawn on many American just how deep our short-term and long-term holes really are. Many others, including politicians who appear to be on their way to key positions after the elections, still don’t seem to get it. This column will focus on the near-term economy — because if we don’t get a handle on a quickly mushrooming mess, and soon, there may not be a long-term.

This nation’s government just completed its second fiscal year with deficits of well over a trillion dollars, a number that was unthinkable just two years ago. Despite claims to the contrary, true cash flow from federal government operations during fiscal 2010 was more negative than the previous year. It only looks better because of increased receipts from the Federal Reserve (more on that in a bit) and cleverly manipulated non-cash accounting entries that arbitrarily and artificially reduced this year’s reported outlays. Net tax collections are still about 20% below where they were two years ago, and are only showing bare signs of turning upward.

After separating several stakeholders from billions of dollars to which they were legally entitled during its bankruptcy and creating a new entity with $30 billion of “fluff” known as “Goodwill” on its balance sheet, the government is finding itself saddled with an investment in a giant but shrinking car company which it may be unable to unload, even in part. Uncle Sam is also having a hard time unwinding its “investment” in Citigroup, the bank former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin helped bring down, without disrupting the markets.

You’ll have to excuse me for doubting that the Obama administration really wants out of either situation. That’s because they are deliberately diving into the ownership game even further. One example: Almost no one knows that the alleged “small business lending” bill which recently whipped through Congress requires government “capital investment” in participating banks as a precondition for their involvement in the program. Their real objective isn’t small business lending; it’s enlarging the scope of the state’s control.

Speaking of enlargement, has anyone noticed what Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has been up to?

Properly employed, the Fed’s “quantitative easing” (QE) — a euphemism for creating money out of nothing, investing it in government bonds, mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds for a while, and then winding those investments down when condition warrant — was supposed to serve as a stabilizing mechanism during the economic recovery. The trouble is that there hasn’t been a meaningful recovery. What little improvement has occurred appears to be stalling out or is at best barely progressing.

This has happened because the administration attempted congenitally ineffective and corrupt “stimulus” programs, enacted a statist health care regime that has left the majority of employer medical plans in a limbo of uncertainty, and has been using the bureaucracy as a weapon against commerce. Beyond that, at any time deemed politically convenient, it has rhetorically bashed and obstructed the productive segments of the private sector, from banking to oil to tourism. An administration and Congress that really cared about inducing a real recovery and reducing the suffering of the nation’s unemployed would at the very least have voted to prevent next year’s scheduled tax increases from taking effect before heading home to defend its electoral turf. Nope.

Ben Bernanke appears to have made the mistake of believing that he was dealing with a rational group of Ruling Class elites who would change course upon learning that what they had tried didn’t work. He clearly miscalculated.

The administration ignored his July warning before Congress that there was very little the Fed could do to make things better with interest rates already at or near zero. It does not seem to have fazed the remnants of Team Obama that many key economic advisers started jumping ship with what’s left of their reputations rather than become permanently associated with this potential mother of all train wrecks. The two remaining key players, Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, seem intent on repeating what hasn’t worked, and won’t work.

Ben Bernanke has been left holding the bag. Rather than allow the markets to collapse, he recently embarked on “QE2,” a second round of easing that will increase the Fed’s investment portfolio to well over $2 trillion.

I fear that Team Obama is starting to like QE, and wouldn’t mind seeing it repeated as many times as necessary until, say, January 19, 2013 or 2017. After all, the larger the Fed’s pool of assets, the greater the income the government collects on its investments. Through August (eleven months of the current fiscal year), Uncle Sam’s receipts from the Fed were up by $41 billion from the same period a year ago. These collections conveniently cover up the fact that five quarters after the alleged recovery began, tax collections from all sources except regular corporations are still down or flat. If QE continues, the administration can go on its merry statist way for two or six more years, while crossing its fingers that good soldier Ben can forestall the inevitable until they leave town. Besides, as Ben’s QE investments expand, the effort begins to look increasingly like a backdoor mechanism for nationalizing the economy. For statists, that’s a feature, not a bug.

QE is in danger of becoming the economy’s crack cocaine. At some point, and it may not be far away, this country’s citizens and the rest of the world — not necessarily in that order — are going to figure out that the habit is unsustainable. The aftermath could get very ugly.

UPDATE, 4:30 p.m.: An e-mailer relays a response from Mr. Kovac — “For the record, my quote was accurate, with the exception of leaving out the word ‘Congressman.’ I stand by my quote. AP had it wrong. I went back and watched that section of the debate to make sure.”

Your move, AP.

(original post follows)

This morning’s question is for Marc Kovac of the Wooster (OH) Daily Record and Julie Carr Smyth of the Associated Press.

The question is: “Which one of you misquoted what incumbent Ohio Democratic Government Ted Strickland said about jobs lost during the Bush administration at Thursday night’s debate with GOP challenger John Kasich?”

Here is the statement involved, as relayed by Kovac (bolds are mine throughout this post):

“If my opponent and his friends had had their way, there likely would have been no surviving auto industry in America,” he said, adding later, “I don’t know what you think the president and our Democratic friends should have done. The fact [is] that 8.5 million jobs were lost, and most of those jobs were lost during the Bush Administration. … All you and you friends want to do is criticize and say ‘No, no, no.’”

But look at how it appeared in Smyth’s report:

“I don’t know what you would have had the president and our Democratic friends do, but the fact is that 8.5 million jobs were lost, Congressman, during the Bush administration,” he said. “We have taken firm action to stabilize this economy, the free fall has been stopped, and all you and your friends want to do is just criticize and say no, no, no.”

Note that each bolded segment is carried as a direct quote without ellipses.

For the record, as seen here, Strickland would be definitely wrong if he really said what Smyth relayed, and, after considering Inauguration Day, barely wrong with Kovac’s quote.

From December 2007 to December 2009, after seasonal adjustments, the economy lost 8.403 million jobs. 4.402 million of them were gone by the end of January 2009, but if you pro-rate January 2009′s 736,000-job loss back to January 20, Inauguration Day, the number drops to about 4.14 million, which is less than half of the total loss, but barely so. Strickland could have said that “about half” of the jobs were lost while Bush remained in charge during the debate, but that would not have had the impact he wanted. So he stretched.

Yesterday’s preliminary estimate announced by the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics that 366,000 fewer people were working in March 2010 than originally thought, and that monthly figures for April 2009 through March 2010 would need to be adjusted to reflect this finding, will render Strickland wrong by an even larger margin when they are finalized in March 2011.

Now let’s look at the potential impact if, as seems likely, Strickland really said what Kovac relayed (“8.5 million jobs were lost, and most of those jobs were lost during the Bush Administration”):

• A Google News search on [Strickland Kasich "8.5 million"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) returns the two reports cited as the only ones who carried this quote.
• A Google News search on the title of Kovac’s item (“Candidates square off in final debate,” typed in quotes) indicates that his report has appeared only at his home paper. Strickland’s assertion as carried is wrong, as shown above, but not seriously so.
• If Smyth misquoted Strickland, as seems likely, it’s a serious error, and her failure to properly quote the Governor requires a correction. Since a Google News search on the title of Smyth’s item (“Ohio governor candidates clash on taxes, spending,” again typed in quotes, sorted by date with duplicates included) shows that her report has appeared in 71 places, make that at least 71 corrections.

Or, again if Strickland said what Kovac quoted, are Julie Carr Smyth and her employer both okay with misleading readers into believing that over four million more jobs were lost during the final year or so of the Bush administration than actually were?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Wadowice, Poland:

Oct 8, 2010 / 04:14 pm

Pope John Paul II’s hometown of Wadowice, Poland is promoting a pair of initiatives in his honor. Between a museum and an interesting memorial project planned for the city square that already bears his name, the late-Pontiff will not soon be forgotten.

Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, was born in the southern city of Wadowice on May 18, 1920. After moving to nearby Krakow for studies at the age of 18, he never again lived in his hometown but returned at every opportunity, even as Pope.

The city, which also celebrated the 90th anniversary of John Paul II’s birth this year, saw the late-Pope’s personal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz and mayor Ewa Filipiak lay the cornerstone for a museum to be dedicated to his life on Tuesday, according to the AP. The stone was placed outside his former home, a two-bedroom apartment, which will be made to appear as it was during his childhood. The neighboring residences will also be used to offer exhibits telling the story of his life as part of the museum that will be opened in 2012. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

To be clear, I’ve always been skeptical of this category, which consists of people who are NOT considered part of the official unemployment rate calculation. During times when help-wanted signs are everywhere, you can’t help but question the sincerity of many who are in this position (that said, I understand the basic-skills problem, and that many in this category would love to be able to do something, anything; someday I’d like to do an education system-related post about that).

The year-over-year comparison for this stat, after mostly improving, if marginally, from April through July, has gone the wrong way during the past two months, and to a serious extent:

If these folks were included in the official unemployment stats, they would add about 4.8% to the unemployment rate by themselves (they are, as best I can tell, NOT part of the “U-6″ calculation, which came in at a seasonally adjusted 17.1% this month, up from 16.7% in August).

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Update, Oct. 20 — This info at ShadowStats using seasonally adjusted data indicates that including “long-term discouraged workers,” which they say hasn’t been done since 1994, would push the fully-loaded unemployment rate to 22.5%. The word “NOT” has thus been added to the last sentence before this update.

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This should not be happening during a genuine economic recovery. But it is, because we aren’t in one. Instead, we’ve just completed the Summer of “Rebound? What Rebound?“

Intense thanks to Matt Hurley and Mark at Weapons of Mass Discussion (their trademark: “People know them”) for extending the invitation to yours truly to attend the speech given today by the likely next Speaker of the House, current Republican Leader and 8th District Ohio Congressman, John Boehner.

After a shuttle bus trip, the roughly 400-500 invitees and probably 50 media types were first treated to a brown-bag lunch at United Group Services in Butler County. We all then went to a separate UGS building where Boehner was to speak. His speech began at about 12:35.

Boehner spoke after a heartfelt introduction from UGS President Mark Mosley.

Here are the top five direct-quote takeaways, in order of appearance, with the exception of the last, which I have bookended from different segments of the speech (bolds and uppercase words are obviously mine):

• “Let me be crystal clear, it if isn’t clear already: this speech is about jobs. And this speech is about jobs, because this coming election is about jobs. It’s about the jobs that were promised to the American people by the current administration, and never delivered.”
• “The truth of the matter is, our economy is built on freedom. You don’t get to prosperity by taking freedom away from the people who create jobs. You achieve prosperity by getting government out of their way.”
• “The pink slips shouldn’t be going to workers here in Ohio. They should be going to the members of Barack Obama’s economic team.”
• “The Pledge to America is a break not only from the direction in which President Obama is headed, but also a break from the direction Republicans were headed when we last had the opportunity to govern. And I can promise you: if we’re entrusted with the opportunity to govern, we are going to do things differently. The American people deserve nothing less, and we will accept nothing less. I will accept nothing less.”

• “At the health care summit last February, President Obama told us it’s OK to have deep philosophical differences and different visions for where we’d lead our country. “That’s what elections are for,” he said. …”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your government hasn’t been listening. Your government is disrespecting you, your family, your job, your children. Your government is out of control.”

  “Do you have to accept it? Do you have to take it? HELL NO YOU DON’T! That’s what elections are for!”

Nicely done, sir.

The full speech follows — after the jump if you’re on the home page — courtesy of Don Seymour.

(more…)

Details and vids from today’s broadcast are here.

After regrouping due to an ISP outage in the area ….

The runup — At least before Wednesday’s ADP Employment Situation Report, which came in with 39,000 private-sector jobs lost in September, the belief was that there would be about 75,000 private-sector jobs added.

Let’s see what things look like after that report and Gallup’s poll showing a 10.1% not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate:

• This AP report is sticking to the 75,000.
• This NY Daily News report is going with +50,000 for the entire job market and an uptick in the unemployment rate to 9.7%.
• This NY Post item is going with 75,000 private-sector jobs and 9.7%.
• Update: In the final minutes before the report, I have to rip at Bloomberg. It’s carrying the same prediction, but with its usual, “we’re so sure of ourselves” arrogance — “Unemployment Probably Rose as U.S. Companies Limited Hiring.” Guys, regardless of how it turns out, you don’t “probably” know anything, and that you’re pretending to “probably” know it pathetic.

This Month’s (Not Seasonally Adjusted) NSA Benchmark

Here’s where we were after August’s report:

Readers may recall that I considered July’s and August’s results pretty decent and okay, respectively.

In this context, I would hope that the on-the-ground in figure in September is 400,000 or fewer jobs lost. This far into a recovery is no time to start grading on a curve, and a -400,000 performance would still trail a couple of years earlier last decade.

Also, don’t forget that the comprehensive adjustment discussed in the latter portions of this Wednesday post still looms large.

The report will appear here at 8:30 a.m.

UPDATE: First paragraph:

Nonfarm payroll employment edged down (-95,000) in September, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Government employment declined (-159,000), reflecting both a drop in the number of temporary jobs for Census 2010 and job losses in local government. Private-sector payroll employment continued to trend up modestly (+64,000).

Here is the preliminarly comprehensive adjustment to prior numbers, which will be finalized in March of next year:

On top of last year’s comprehensive adjustment of -902,000 jobs (-933,000) in the private sector), that brings the two-year total of such adjustments to -1,268,000 (-1,304,000 in the private sector). The marvels of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, which as readers here know began in roughly May-June of 2008, are something to behold, aren’t they?

UPDATE 2: Here is the new NSA private-sector table —

September’s figure came in just short of the 400,000 benchmark. If you include prior-month adjustments that net out to about +20,000 jobs, you could argue that the benchmark was met. That’s fine, but I can’t help but remember yesterday’s surprisingly strong assertion by Gallup (surprising because the pollster’s words are usually pretty measured) that BLS probably missed some of the decay that may have occurred in late September.

We obviously won’t know for sure if Gallup is right for a couple of months. But if Team Obama was looking for any kind of evidence in today’s report that what it has done since it took power is bearing meaningful fruit, it has to be disappointed. I’m far more disappointed for the millions of unemployed and under-employed who have been ill-served by this government’s policies. Based on past experience, millions of them would be working today instead of being unemployed, or working full-time instead of part-time, if proper steps with a proven track record had been taken.

UPDATE 3: There’s better news on the unemployment-rate front, as the NSA rate, despite Gallup’s take, came down —

I was concerned yesterday that this rate might go up, so it’s a relief that it came in where it did. But it deserves closer scrutiny, which is coming …. aha, here’s the problem:

Simply put, lots people are clearly staying on the sidelines. At this point in a recovery after a severe recession, both the employment-population ratio and and the workforce participation rate should be heading upward, and they aren’t. In the early 1980s recovery, these NSA percentages did increase year-over-year. In this alleged recovery, it’s still not happening.

The pollster says so.

Here is how Gallup’s not seasonally adjusted (NSA) unemployment rate has compared to the BLS’s analogous rate this year:

Okay, Gallup seems to exaggerate the highs and lows, but the latest jump is pretty steep, and would appear to foretell an increase in the official NSA rate tomorrow.

If BLS comes in with an NSA rate that is 9.7% or higher, it will be fair to say that the recovery is over where it matters most — regardless of what the seasonally adjusted rate is.

I’ll look at the jobs added/lost situation, specifically what’s needed on an NSA basis, tomorrow morning before the BLS releases its report.

In the course of preparing a post earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) dealing with a glaring error in a New York Times story on planned Christmas/holiday/fourth quarter hiring, I came across this search result at Google news on “holiday retail sales” (not entered in quotes) at about 11 a.m.:

With all due respect to WHIO in Dayton and reporter John Bedell, I don’t understand how your story made the top of the charts, or how other sources with far higher traffic didn’t. Perhaps someone with Google-y knowledge far superior to mine can explain it.

Here are a few paragraphs from Bedell’s report:

Holiday sales projected to spike this year

The nation’s largest retail trade group said this week that it projects sales for retailers across the U.S. to climb after two years of slow sales tied to the recession.

The National Retail Federation said that retail sales will climb 2.3 percent to $447.1 billion for the 2010 holiday rush.

This comes as welcome news for many retailers who saw sales in November and December climb a measly 0.4 percent in 2009 and watched as sales fell four percent in 2008.

… even though the projections aren’t a sign that the economy is in full recovery, Ellen Davis, VP of public relations for the National Retail Federation, says the forecast does indicate that the economy has at least turned the corner.

Bedell’s enthusiasm over the nature of the anticipated increase in Christmas season sales isn’t warranted, given the results of the past 15 years as charted at the National Retail Federation (“mouseover” below will not work, but does work at the NRF link):

Bedell’s “spike,” if it materializes as the NRF predicts, will be clearly lower than 9 of the 14 previous reported years, and will be about the same as two others. Excuse me for not being impressed.

As seen in the Google News graphic above, other news sources are taking more measured views.

So how did WHIO’s report get to the top? If the station is using an outside company to optimize search engine results, that firm’s phones should be ringing off the hook. If it happens again, it would be nice if such a high search result placement were accompanied by higher-quality journalism.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Reuters (“Bank foreclosure cover seen in bill at Obama’s desk”):

A bill that homeowners advocates warn will make it more difficult to challenge improper foreclosure attempts by big mortgage processors is awaiting President Barack Obama’s signature after it quietly zoomed through the Senate last week.

The bill, passed without public debate in a way that even surprised its main sponsor, Republican Representative Robert Aderholt, requires courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents.

The timing raised eyebrows, coming during a rising furor over improper affidavits and other filings in foreclosure actions by large mortgage processors such as GMAC, JPMorgan and Bank of America.

Questions about improper notarizations have figured prominently in challenges to the validity of these court documents, and led to widespread halts of foreclosure proceedings.

Read the whole thing.

Background:

GMAC Mortgage, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America have suspended foreclosures in 23 states to evaluate if there were errors due to “robo-signing“. “Robo-signers” are bank middle managers who sign the paperwork that allowed banks to repossess homes that are in default, without properly reviewing the underlying documents they were signing.

Comments: Michelle Malkin, Zero Hedge (“virtually every single foreclosure in the US in the past several years is under question”).

Update (via Commenter Dave below): Obama has pocket-vetoed.

Two New York Times reporters were out to lunch, while the Old Gray Lady’s layers of fact-checkers were apparently asleep at the switch.

In an item which contained a number of oddities, Times reporters Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell wrote the following:

Over all, full-time work in retail is slightly down. The number of people employed in the retail sector in August fell 4.9 percent, to 14.4 million, from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

My initial reaction was to wonder how a 4.9% drop in employment, which would involve about 700,000 jobs, could be “slight.” But in this case, media bias isn’t the problem (possible examples of bias will come later).

A look at the same BLS data the Times pair must have used reveals a likely level of sloppiness that should never gotten online, let alone into print (which it did — on Page B1 in the October 6 paper):

The closest I can get to what Clifford and Rampell may have meant to write is that seasonally adjusted jobs in retail dropped by 4.9 thousand in August 2010 compared to July (14438.7 minus 14433.8).

As you can see above, as well as in this table covering the same period’s not seasonally adjusted numbers, there’s no conceivable way you can get to a 4.9% drop in anything during the past year. Drops from August 2009 were actually 0.30% (seasonally adjusted) and 0.24% (not seasonally adjusted). Drops from August 2008 were both a bit above 5%.

Beyond that, I’m virtually certain that the table above encompasses all retail workers, not just full-timers.

Unless I’m missing something, Clifford’s and Rampell’s effort is really weak, as is the failure to catch the problems in their report.

Also weak were the following items:

• The article’s title as it appears online and in the print edition is appropriately grim: “Dim Outlook for Holiday Jobs.” Oddly, though, the web page’s title bar is a lukewarm “Holiday Hiring by Retailers Not Expected to Rise Much.” Guess which title shows up in Google News searches (search was on “holiday retail sales new york times,” not in quotes; third item in search done at about 10:30 a.m. ET)?
• The pair’s overall statement about retailers’ hiring plans — that “The recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, forecasts that retailers will add up to 600,000 jobs in October, November and December, compared with a net gain of 501,400 holiday jobs over the same three months in 2009″ — is nice as far as it goes. But it overlooks that fact, as shown here at Challenger Gray’s announcement (scroll to the end), that a 600,000-job fourth-quarter surge would still badly trail every year from 2002 to 2007 except 2003, which came in at 640,000. Only a slight shortfall from Challenger Gray’s prediction will cause this year to trail the 585,000-job performance turned in during the last three months of 2001.

The Old Gray Lady should be able to produce better output than this.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

The sub-headline:

Between the president’s economic power grabs and the Fed chairman’s “quantitative easing” schemes, the future continues to darken for our long-term economic prospects.

Key assertion: Ben Bernanke’s “quantitative easing” is on the verge of turning into the economy’s crack cocaine. See why at the column.

It will go up at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

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Related:

- Washington Post (“Bernanke warns of high budget deficits”) –

The nation’s economic future would be endangered if the government does not rein in budget deficits in the years ahead, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Monday, and Congress should consider new budgeting rules to try to make that happen.

… (He said) that “economic conditions provide little scope for reducing deficits significantly further over the next year or two” and that “premature fiscal tightening could put the recovery at risk” which implies that the tax cuts should not be allowed to expire in 2010.

- New York Post (“Bonkers for debt, Ben batters the buck”) –

Fed chief Ben Bernanke has a voracious appetite for Treasury debt — a gluttonous streak that is creating havoc and agita in global markets.

According to the latest figures published by the central bank, Big Ben just passed the Japanese government yesterday to be No.2 holder of US debt, right behind China, sopping up $821.2 billion of Tim Geithner’s bonds and bills for his balance sheet.

The ramifications of Bernanke’s actions are playing out in exchanges across the globe as the dollar weakened yesterday to a 15-year low against the yen, despite the Japanese finance minister’s own quantitative easing interventions to weaken the yen.

- Reuters at Fox Business (“IMF revises U.S. growth down, jobs picture bleak”) –

In a sober assessment of the U.S. outlook, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) pulled down its estimate for 2010 growth to 2.6 percent from the 3.3 percent it published in July and said gross domestic product or GDP will expand 2.3 percent in 2011 instead of 2.9 percent.

“The most likely prospect for the U.S. economy is for a continued but slow recovery, with growth far weaker than in previous recoveries, considering the depth of the recession,”the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook published ahead of weekend semi-annual meetings of it and the World Bank.

The IMF said the main reason the U.S. recovery is so weak is that consumer spending is sluggish and suggests it is little wonder that is the case.

This analysis from last week estimated that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.0% in the third quarter. Even if the downwardly adjusted predictions for the rest of 2010 and all of 2011 are correct (if the government continues on its current course, I think it’s optimistic), it’s not the kind of growth that will significantly impact employment.

As discussed last week, any time someone describes the lack of consumer spending as a primary impediment to economic growth, they’re proving that they totally don’t understand where economic growth comes from.

______________________________________________

UPDATE: Not so much fun with numbers — for the IMF’s full-year estimate for 2010 of 2.6% to come true, based on what’s already in the books (1Q10, 3.7%; 2Q10, 1.7%), the economy will have to grow at an annualized 2.4% – 2.5% during the second half.

If the third quarter comes in at the 2.0% cited above, the fourth quarter will have to be 2.9% – 3.0%. That doesn’t seem likely. One indicator is that Christmas season hiring at retail stores is not going to be impressive:

After a disappointing back-to-school season, many retailers say they intend to barely increase their seasonal jobs from last year, when hiring was among the lowest in the 14 years tracked by the National Retail Federation.

Some big national chains — like Wal-Mart and Best Buy — say they will not hire any more workers than last year. And even some of the more bullish retailers say the growth will not be significant.

“It’s a slight increase, it’s not a huge increase,” said Jim Sluzewski, a spokesman at Macy’s, which expects to hire 65,000 seasonal workers.

The recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, forecasts that retailers will add up to 600,000 jobs in October, November and December, compared with a net gain of 501,400 holiday jobs over the same three months in 2009.

The National Retail Federation predicts a 2.3% increase in November and December 2010 sales over a year ago. The clothing and toy stores will have to show great improvement, because I’m sensing a bloodbath in consumer electronics.