BOISE - President Obama will reach a big milestone this week. It is the first anniversary of his election. Anniversaries typically call for celebration, but some say there's little to be happy about in this economy.
It was a year ago this coming week that some Idahoans cheered on as Barack Obama was elected president of a nation tumbling into a financial abyss. In his weekly address, the president said Sunday without the government's stimulus efforts, the economy would have been much worse.
"It is easy to forget that it was only several months ago that the economy was shrinking rapidly and many economists feared another Great Depression," Obama said.
Nationally, this past week brought encouraging news. The economy grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter and home sales edged back up. But there is discouraging news locally about the housing market. Realty Trac calls the Boise/Nampa market one of the nation's new foreclosure hot spots. It says among the top 50 metro foreclosure rates, the three biggest year-over-year increases were in Boise/Nampa, Provo/Orem, Utah and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Realty Trac says foreclosure rates in Boise/Nampa are up 142 percent from the third quarter of 2008. There are now 4,157 homes in the Boise/Nampa market in foreclosure.
Idaho is doing better when it comes to unemployment. The state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate dropped a tenth of a point to 8.8 percent in September. Nationally, the unemployment rate went in the other direction, rising a tenth of a percentage point to 9.8 percent.
The Obama administration announced Friday that 2,103 Idaho jobs were created or saved by the federal stimulus spending so far, but Republicans aren't buying it.
Representative John Boehner says, "Americans all around the country continue to ask question, 'where are the jobs?'" Boehner went on to say that most of the jobs created or saved are government jobs. But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the stimulus spending is just starting to show results.
"It's going to take some time for unemployment to come down, for jobs to get created again, " Geithner said.
Economists expect the national unemployment rate to go up again this week when the latest job report is released.
Through early October this year, Idaho paid out nearly $504 million in regular, extended and supplemental unemployment insurance benefits to people who are out of work. That is an all-time record payout for any year in the state's history and more than double all of 2008’s total record payout of $247 million.
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