Jobless claims at 3.5 year low (drops to 366K)

Reuters ^

[kiryandil]

We need to come to grips with the possibility that the economy is improving and that we will not have the economy of the past 3 years to campaign on. That will make it tougher, but anticipating it will help. Ignoring it or denying it will just cause us to go into the campaign with blinders on and we’ll look like fools trying to deny the obvious (by that time, if growth continues, as it is likely to do.)

LOL! Obama and his media are going to have to play Weekend At Bernie's with the economy up to the election. It's going to be "interesting times" in 2012.

BTW - the economy is NOT improving. You can't borrow to get out of debt.

[kiryandil]

http://ows.doleta.gov/press/2011/121511.asp

UNADJUSTED DATA

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 433,287 in the week ending December 10, a decrease of 95,506 from the previous week. There were 491,776 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.8 percent during the week ending December 3, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,516,999, a decrease of 179,155 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.2 percent and the volume was 4,062,531.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending November 26 was 7,449,507, an increase of 874,670 from the previous week.

[emax]

Obviously, it’s not something we wanna celebrate over. And it is in a way somethign we should be very upset over for the blatantly obvious reason that it makes Obama look good. But I wonder if maybe it’s time to start looking at these kinds of news in a truly balanced way. Perhaps this is a sign of American capitalists and the private sector and businesses using old fashioned laissez faire ideals, and ideals taken from our actual Constitiution, to make things better and give people more work opportunities IN SPITE of what the Obama administration is doing. We all know that if things are getting better, it’s got nothing to do with Zero. That’s our given. How much can we concede that things are improving and how can we convince voters that getting Obama out is what’s needed to ensure it keeps improving and we avoid another 1930s scenario.

[BigEdLB]

Cook the books? Lots of experience with the Chicago gang at Pennsylvania Avenue. Elections are tough in comparison ...Unemployment #s are a lot easier...

[BigEdLB]

Cook the books? Lots of experience with the Chicago gang at Pennsylvania Avenue. Elections are tough in comparison ...Unemployment #s are a lot easier...

[BigEdLB]

Cook the books? Lots of experience with the Chicago gang at Pennsylvania Avenue. Elections are tough in comparison ...Unemployment #s are a lot easier...

[RipSawyer]

Sounds to me like a man who has had his femoral artery slashed and thinks he is recovering because the blood flow is slowing due to the fact that he has already lost more than half his total blood supply. Full recovery by this indicator comes at about the same moment as death.

[RipSawyer]

“- not that most Americans have a clue.”
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True, if most DID have a clue we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. There was a decades long process of dumbing down the electorate to prepare the country for the takeover.

[RipSawyer]

“we avoid another 1930s scenario.”
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I suspect that in many ways things are already WORSE than the 1930s, reports indicate that REAL unemployment is actually comparable to that period. We have forty some million on food stamps, imagine if that group were going to public soup kitchens, it would look as bad as it really is! We also have “Obamavilles” starting up in many areas where homeless people live in parked vehicles or tents. Then there is the matter of people back in the thirties having far more knowledge and ability to get by on very little compared to today’s population. Many today would starve under the same conditions in which people of that era simply tightened their belts and kept on keeping on. They were used to struggle long before the depression started. I was born in 1944 and most people today would give up if they had to face the conditions in which my parents thrived and raised four healthy sons. How many today can imagine having their children still in grade school pulling a two man saw to cut firewood?

All the obama administration’s book cooking cannot change the fact that TOTAL NATIONAL WEALTH is shrinking, numbers can be manipulated but that fact cannot be.

[aruanan]

Jobless claims at 3.5 year low (drops to 366K)

This is a fraudulent claim. That is, three and a half years ago there were millions of more jobs in the U.S. economy than there are now. 366K/number of jobs then is a much smaller number than 366K/number of jobs now. So if 366K is held constant while the total number of jobs decreases, then 366K becomes an increasingly bad problem. To say that joblessness remains unchanged because the number of claims remains unchanged is simply false. The proportion of people of people losing their jobs grows as that number stays constant against a shrinking number of jobs. For instance:

366K jobs lost/36,600K total number of jobs = 0.01 or 1%
366K jobs lost/3,660K total number of jobs = 0.10 or 10%
366K jobs lost/366K total number of jobs = 1.0 or 100%