Posted on 08/07/2009 6:31:35 PM PDT by rightey1
I always thought the unemployment rate was reliable, well I have learned the hard way, as this morning I woke up to 250,000 more Americans unemployed, reports of future layoffs expected to be very high, and that the unemployment rate has fallen to 9.4%. Say what?
(Excerpt) Read more at righthandedpitcher.blogspot.com ...
Never trust anything from the government, period!
This, my friend, is what a cooked book looks like.
Now the question is whether that many people actually stopped looking for a job, or is the Obama administration quick to kick people out of the labor force to make their unemployment rate look better. I heard without that big reduction in the labor force, the unemployment rate would have been 9.7% or 9.8% in July.
The widely reported “unemployment rate” is always deceiving. It only counts those that have been recently unemployed, and receiving benefits. The REAL unemployment rate, known as “U6”, is the on that really matters.
I live in a rural area, and during the 90s we lost thousands and thousands of manufacturing jobs from plants closing and going out of the country. For a while our unemployment rate was around 30%, then it eventually went down to 17%, around where it is now. No significant number of jobs have been created here since then, yet the unemployment rate is half of what it was when the big job purge happened.
For a work force on the order of 150 million a 9.5% to 9.4% shift is just a rounding error.
The irony here is that the administration benefits from those who have given up. Obama gets the benefit of those who have LOST HOPE!
Righto. Obama has hired Betty Crocker for accounting Czar. She is famous for the best Cookedbooks.
All government economic figures have been fabrications for years. This is nothing new. It’s virtually impossible to compare any figure year to year because the rules keep changing. The one that always cracks me up is the “excluding the highly volatile food and energy prices”...well, eating and keeping warm are just extravagances, anyway.
Oh the one I hate the most is “better than expected”.
that’s funny, very nicely done
But you just might be collecting food stamps.
Wasn't it just the other day that news came out that the most Americans ever were on food stamps...34 million I believe it was.
As you drop off the unemployment rolls as your benefits expire, you migrate to food stamps.
Nope. The unemployment rate is based on a statistical survey which has nothing to do with those who are collecting unemployment insurance.
We lost 257,000 jobs in July, but the unemployment rate magically dropped from 9.5% to 9.4%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics removed 422,000 unemployed people from the official count, because they are not actively looking for work. These are people who would like to find a job, but they've given up the job search.
During the Bush Administration, the people at DU and Daily Kos claimed that there were millions of people like this. Now, Daily Kos and DU are suddenly silent about them.
If those 422,000 people were counted as part of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be 9.6%, not 9.4%.
I want to clarify that these were people who dropped out of the labor force for ANY reason, including retirement or disability; and it’s a “net loss” since the people who drop out is offset by the number of new workers who join the labor force: recent graduates, recent immigrants, and housewives whose youngest children were just sent off to college or the military, for example.
The calculus that goes into the estimate of the size of the labor force is fairly compex, as you can see. It depends on a number of factors.
The important thing is that the admin has taken ownership of the numbers, citing it as evidence that what they are doing has helped.
They still have to get the number below what it was when they entered office, 7.6% percent for January 2009, and 7.2% in December 2008.
More startling is what happens if it goes up again, or largely remains flat. They have admitted now that this is evidence that their policies are working. Logically, they have to accept that this too is evidence of what their stimulus plan does.
They have to start taking more responsibility from now on.
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