Posted on 12/16/2009 3:40:50 PM PST by Lorianne
The Detroit News’ Mike Wilkinson has an eye-opening story on how unemployment rates generally under-report true joblessness — and specifically how this is happening in Michigan’s largest city.
The story points out that Detroit’s official unemployment rate of 27 percent (as of October) may be dramatically under-counting those without work in the economically-strapped city. The actual unemployment rate, when you factor in those who have given up looking for work or who have gone back to school following fruitless searching for work, could be as high as 45 percent.
Similarly, official joblessness stats don’t include early-retirees — those who want or need to continue to work but have fallen victim to corporate downsizing — or those who work part-time but would really prefer full-time work.
The story quotes Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who has studied employment patterns in the Midwest.
(Excerpt) Read more at michiganmessenger.com ...
The other half are on welfare.
There was a nearly identical story about the unemployment rate in New Orleans, just a few months pre-Katrina. I wonder what percentage of the unemployed adults in these blue cities have *never* had a job?
It’s worth repeating.
You do not want to be in the inner city when the checks stop coming.
Grocery stores only have three days of food on hand. When that’s gone, what then?
I hope that Obama wakes up and smells the coffee when he sees this ...
Gov. Jennifer Granholm pushed through massive tax increases at the beginning of 2007, and look where it got them ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2022402/posts
Here is the link to the WSJ story referenced in the above post:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121192942396124327.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
I believe it. Just look at at the physical decay of that city. It seems to me that there's not much productive work going on or coming out of Detroit. Perhaps everyone is spending their time filling out forms for unemployment benefits or welfare.
One of the things about this that has puzzled me, how do you measure the unemployment rates in the cities you mentioned. Many of these people may have never legally existed, heard some horror stories in my youth.
"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:230
Jefferson understood some 240 years ago, what Democrats fail to understand today.
The city of Detroit has been shrinking for decades now after it’s peak in the 1960’s, following the “white flight” after the riots at that time.
There are a lot of nice suburbs, but the city is a war zone with few exceptions. Mostly liquor stores, bullet proof glass around any cash register in the city, pawn shops, and burning cars (insurance fraud) every day, and a “Devils night” that is infamous. Under 1 million now, it is rotting from the core. I haven’t been there in years to be honest, but I suspect it is the same.
Does anybody know of a Detroit ping list.
I find the subject fascinating.
Unemployment is probably only 15% if you do not count drug dealers and pitbull fight clubs.
They’re not necessarily unemployed, but involved in a “cash-only” black market job that flies under the Uber-federal govt radar. Higher taxes=More CASH ONLY, under the table “businesses”. Those Detroit entrepeneurs are Ayn Randians, they’re just too stupid to know it.
Ann Arbor has the lowest unemployment in the state. Its no coincidence that they have the highest number of taxpayer funded jobs.
Just wondering what property taxes would be like in Detroit?
Another good barometer of true unemployment is sales tax receipts. I’d say true unemployment in the US right now is closer to 25% than 10%.
On Detroit, I found it instructive when watching “Life without People” that Detroit was used as a prop..
Does this figure include A) those who have given up looking for work, and B) those who have never in their lives looked for work anyway? ;’)
Of course they are liberals.
Inner cities do not have grocery stores. At least, there are no large or notable grocery stores in Detroit. This has been discussed a few times at the DetroitYes forums. I'm not sure what the connection is between food on hand in grocery stores and a stoppage of "the checks." Are you suggesting that, lacking funds on their EBT cards, city residents will rob the grocery stores, who will be unable to restock because they weren't paid for their goods, and so shutter their doors? I guess it's possible. It seems unlikely, somehow.
Sounds like a leftist Utopia to me.
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