Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Obama is taking credit for full employment. The economy is roaring. The unemployment rate is under 5%. The recession is over.
Or is it? The BLS says we didn’t gain 195,000 jobs, we lost 665,000 jobs. So are those people unemployed? Turns out, it depends on what the meaning of “unemployed” is. We’re back in Clinton-land.
The red line is U3 – people who are unemployed and have looked for work within the past four weeks.
The grey line is U6 – people who are unemployed and have looked for work within the past year.
The blue line is an estimate of people who are unemployed and have not looked for work within the past year because there’s no point – there are no jobs for people with their education and experience. They’ve given up hope.
Meanwhile, this Federal Reserve study concludes at least some of the unemployment is caused by immigrants. President Obama’s most recent plan would exacerbate the problem.
What it tells me is: all the numbers are lies. The government agencies lie to us, they lie to each other, they lie to the media. It’s like the old Soviet Union claiming record harvests as they beg the UN for food because harvests were so bad.
I don’t think this is the Full Employment that we were looking for.
Joe Doakes
Honesty has fewer opportunities for graft.
And the next two elitist, uber rich lying DemocRAT candidates promise that their free stuff, crack downs on other rich people and make work jobs policies, will turn everything around!
I’m sprucing up that beach front property that I own on the western Arizona border for one of the ignorant slaves on the libidiot plantation that voted for one of these losers!
It strikes me that we need some other metrics for unemployment. As the chart demonstrates, the standard metrics aren’t working, and even workforce participation doesn’t work–my wife does not technically participate, and that’s exactly the way we want it, as working outside the home would actually COST us money after paying for daycare and the like for six kids.
Maybe “household employment rate”–the percentage of households where at least one adult resident is working? Even that’s not perfect, because it would score a “yes” when one person is getting minimum wage and the main wage earner is out of work. Another possibility is the prevalence of people taking welfare payments–higher being of course worse.
And then you’ve got the likelihood of people simply gaming the system no matter what you do. Seems as if we’ve got to get the congenital liars–Obama, Clinton, Drumpf, etc..–out of politics to fix this one.
When we have 95 MILLION working aged adults who ARE NOT WORKING, we do not have 5% unemployment.
What’s telling is that if we go back to the way that unemployment was measured during the Great Depression, we’re pretty much on par with their peak unemployment numbers of about 15%.
Recovery? What recovery? The ones who have recovered are the bankers and big buck investors that Obama and his cronies bailed out.
Which one of those numbers was never going to get above 8%? Because it looks to me like somebody lied, and jobs died.
Bill: I’d simply argue that stat alone does not tell the tale. Imagine–yes, dream world here–a society where 90% of men and women married by age 22, the men were providers, and the women stayed home raising children and baking kolacky. That society–really pretty close to the society my dad grew up in–could have 95 million non-employed results and a < 5% unemployment rate, no?
And as my dad would tell you, such a society was great for a skinny kid who would periodically get invited in so he could "fatten up" on a few kolacky.
Bikebubba, one of the ways I am retro (there are many) is that I don’t think that middle and working class married women should work if they are raising a family (note the provisos). Fer God’s sake,they rarely make enough money to make it worthwhile. We aren’t talking lawyers, here, we’re talking low end factory work and low end retailing, for the most part.
Where are these women who make so much money that they put their husbands to shame? I’ve seen them on TV, never actually met any.