Posted on 07/03/2008 7:10:46 AM PDT by Perdogg
The US economy shed jobs for the sixth consecutive month in June, but the unemployment rate managed to hold steady as economists expected, the Labor Department said today.
The economy lost 62,000 jobs in June, just a bit more than the 60,000 lost jobs economists polled by Thomson Reuters IFR Markets were expecting.
(Excerpt) Read more at hemscott.com ...
GM will be broke soon, people will resort to cannibalism because of global warming, and streets will be ablaze in weeks!!!!! NBC told me so.
Bad news sells, reality is, unemployment is holding steady and jobs are being done away with and created all the time. I don't know if it's just the media's need to sensationalize and harp on negatives or if it's politically motivated since some see bad economic news as beneficial for the Democrat campaign, but the over blown trash news channels like NBC have been trowing out is beyond belief. They hardly qualify as news anymore.
The number of unemployed persons was essentially unchanged in June, at 8.5 million, and the unemployment rate held at 5.5 percent. A year earlier, the number of unemployed persons was 7.0 million, and the jobless rate was 4.6 percent. (See table A-1.)
The unemployment rate for Hispanics (7.7 percent) increased over the month, while the rate for adult men (5.1 percent) continued to trend up. Jobless rates for adult women (4.7 percent), teenagers (18.1 percent), whites (4.9 per- cent), and blacks (9.2 percent) showed little or no change in June. The unemployment rate for Asians was 4.5 percent, not seasonally adjusted.
If you are not black or Hispanic, things remain good.
Republicans tend NOT to support hikes in the minimum wage for this very reason...employers will cut back on entry level jobs resulting in an increase in unemployment.
Let's see, now...who raised the minimum wage, and when?
The MSM will never make that connection, either.
It’s a chance to blame the Republicans, and it’s a meaningless statistic. It’s been happening all year, and has been worthless.
Why? Simple - we’ve been shedding jobs but the unemployment rate holds steady. How can this be? SIMPLE: retirees! Don’t forget that the leading edge of the baby boomers are starting to retire now. Those are lost jobs, but since the retiree is NOT counted as unemployed (he’s done working), they don’t add to the unemployment rate.
We’re shedding jobs, true. But these aren’t actual losses in employment; they’re people withdrawing from the workforce altogether. And doing so at a greater rate than we’re adding.
Where’s the difference coming from? Productivity increases. Just like has happened in manufacturing or farming. We’re at all-time-highs in terms of output of manufactured and farmed goods, but we do it with 1/4th the people needed 40 years ago. Productivity, efficiency.
Bottom line: I’d be worried if we WEREN’T losing jobs now, because that would mean a lot of the baby boomers aren’t retiring, and that would happen if they weren’t ready to retire, financially. Most of the early wave are old enough to have saved enough for retirement, and should actually withdraw from the workforce.
If the opposite was happening, we’d be in a world of hurt. Why? Those jobs that are being shed - and a lot more than that - would still be occupied meaning that new grads and recent additions to the workforce would not find employment (spots kept by retirees), and our unemployment rate would actually increase.
The frog is not alarmed.
It is the sixth month of job losses.
The revisions to prior months plus the June headline come to what, 114,000 jobs lost?
I keep telling people to look at the revisions to these government economic numbers. All of this is modeling, not actual counting of jobs lost.
Models are often wrong.
Consider this: the BLS numbers show much greater dispersion when there are job gains than when there are job losses. Why is that?
It’s always nice to se that there are Star Trek fans on here, despite the utopian outlook that the various series have. I sort of can’t help liking it because I grew up with it. :-)
Birth-death model added over 120k new “jobs”. These aren’t actually counted anywhere.
Ah yes, we are doomed.
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