About Those Unemployment Numbers
Jan 9, 2010 Political
Don Surber takes a look at the unemployment numbers for the country. The numbers for December came out yesterday and they were 10 times higher than expected. But the numbers do not tell the entire story because of tricky accounting.
For the second month in a row, Americans were told that there was a net loss in jobs nationally, but that the unemployment rate had either fallen or remained the same.
This is bogus.
Two years ago, in December 2007, there was a net gain of only 18,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate soared from 4.7% to 5.0% in that one month.
In December 2009, there was a net loss of 85,000 jobs. And the unemployment rate remained unchanged, at 10.0%?
We have lost a net total of 96,000 in two months and the unemployment rate fell from 10.2%?
This is liberal math.
As Heidi Shierholz pointed out, the Department of labor is reducing the number of people in the work force dramatically — shrinking it by 661,000 people in just one month — down to a labor force of only 64.6% of those eligible.
Without that shrinkage, unemployment would be 10.4%, Shierholz said.
The reason that it still looks and feels bad is because it is still bad even though they keep telling us that it is getting better and the stimulus is working.
As Surber points out here:
Those numbers do not add up. Clearly the administration is removing people from the labor market statistically at a faster rate than jobs are disappearing in some sort of desperate attempt to rationalize a $787 billion stimulus dud.
The government has all kinds of accounting tricks (like global warming scientists) to hide the decline. They use methods that would land private business owners in jail and they get away with it. Keep in mind that we keep losing jobs (and that is under reported) and the rate holds steady or drops. It makes no sense unless people are being removed from the equation.
Also keep in mind this is the same government that tells you there was a surplus of money when Clinton was president even though the government had (and still has) massive debt.
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Tags: don surber, fuzzy math, government accounting., unemployment