Posted on 02/07/2009 2:53:32 PM PST by george76
How about the self-employed, including the many that have created basically one-person careers working at home with a computer? Are they included in employed/unemployed stats along with those that are on some company payroll?
They measure is by people who are getting unemployment benefits,which doesn’t count everyone.
The other group that doesn’t show up is the self-employed, like me, who can’t collect unemployment when they get no work for six weeks at a time.
The measure is by phone survey, and they make a great effort to count everyone. They call quite a few randomly selected houses in each census block, and if you don’t answer they send a guy out to knock on the door.
If your made any money through employment or self-employment in the past week, you are employed. If you didn’t, and are looking for work, you are unemployed.
My point is that the “The Other Unemployment Rate: 13.9%” seems to have shocked some people on this thread, yet the black unemplopyment rate under the conventional system is almost as high. It must be much higher under the other rate, approaching Depression levels.
Its cultural. It was high ten years ago. It was high twenty years ago. I wouldn’t cry over these figures.
Unemployment is less than it was in ‘92 —defined as workers looking for work. By adding non-workers who’re not looking for work we’ve come up with an unemployment rate twice as high. Big deal. I mean, if we want we could add in all children under 16, the terminally hospitalized, imprisoned felons, and soldiers killed in the Civil War and end up with an unemployment rate of several thousand percent.
Ah that’s the denial we’ve been missing from the economic threads these past three thousand DJII points or so. Give my regards to toddsterpatriot next time you see him at the shared internet terminals at the library.
Thanks to urban planners & utopians who see them as guinea pigs.
The living wage (& regulations) are killing them.
You are right. Hoover made it worse with bad tax policy and protectionism - Smoot-Hawley.
Friedman believed the Fed acted against the Bank of the United States, a Jewish owned bank, for anti-Semitic reasons, thus precipitating the banking crisis. They should have acted as the lender of last resort and worked out a minor situation. Instead they got a panic.
Check the rest of the history.
Isn’t unemployment a creation of the Nanny-state?
1. I cannot contract with any employee for a price we agree to unless it is above an arbitrary minimum wage.
2. Unemployment benefits discourage workers from finding on the books employment.
3. Anti-business regulation, taxes, laws (leading to lawsuits) which all lead to less employment (small business is the driver of employment because they get to avoid much of the madness, big business could generate just as many jobs if allowed to).
I could continue, but you are likely nauseated already.
Ah that’s the denial
If you're not denying the facts then you may not know that this WSJ Obama suckup is trying to make unemployment look twice as bad as it is so Obama can raise taxes.
The BLS puts standard unemployment at 7.6% by dividing the number of laid-off job seekers (11,606,000) by all workers with or without jobs (153,716,000). The Obama suckups need a higher number to justify a taxhike, so they use the BLS U6 numbers that count folks who don't want work enough to actually look for it. What happens is for every 100 people that may or may not be bothering to look for work, there are almost 14 that don't have jobs. This almost doubles the 7.6% of those willing to seek a job.
Happy April 15th everyone!
Every time U6 (non-job seekers) is measured, it always ends up at 7/4ths times the official U3 rate. This puts mid 1975 U6 at 15.8% and 1982 at 18.9%. That means our current slump isn't as bad as those ones.
You mean we are being manipulated? ;-]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.