Some things just don’t make sense to me. The initial jobless claims report comes out every week with 400,000+ new claims. We are told (every week), that the number must be significantly below 400,000 if we are to have a stable job market. Then the monthly unemployment number comes out and it remains stable (albeit high). ???
figures don’t lie- but liars can figure
check participation rate
Why doesn’t the unemployment level increase with more people filing for benefits and no jobs created? Easy. The totals don’t reflect the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have given up on finding a job and are no longer reflected in the labor totals.
Reuters had an interesting article about a month ago that actually reflected this trend. The wire service fouind that if the labor market today was the same size as the day Zero took office, unemployment would be over 11 percent.
The monthly unemployment figure isn’t made up of real numbers of people actually counted.
It’s arrived at by polling......................
“Some things just don’t make sense to me. The initial jobless claims report comes out every week with 400,000+ new claims. We are told (every week), that the number must be significantly below 400,000 if we are to have a stable job market. Then the monthly unemployment number comes out and it remains stable (albeit high). ???”
The statistic is manipulated from the get-go. The UE rate is the number of people actively seeking jobs divided by the number of people in the labor force. OK, here’s your manipulation: If someone runs out of their 99 weeks (used to be 26) of UE benefits, BY DEFINITION they are not actively seeking a job AND are not part of the labor force (yet there is no money coming in for that person/family to put food on the table). Someone who gets discouraged after X number of months looking for a job and stays at home eating popcorn is also not in the labor force. The guy who lost a $75,000/year job and replaced it with a $12/hour, 20-hour/week job with no benies, just to have something coming in IS counted as employed - despite having their wages cut to about 1/6 of his original compensation (not including the lost benies).
Note that the UE number reported is known as “U3.” This is a different number than the way it used to be calculated. There are 2 measures that more accurately measure UE: first is “U6,” which is a broader measure (by the Labor Dept) of unemployment. That figure is over 16%. Then there is the Shadow Government Statistics (SGS) alternative number which attempts to measure UE as the government measured it before the Clinton Administration defined long-term unemployed people out of existence (and there was manipulation, to a lesser extent, before that). Presidents of both parties are guilty of messing with the GDP, inflation and UE statistics. See http://www.shadowstats.com/article/primers_intro and http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts for an introduction.
FYI, the SGS measure of UE is now around 23% - that’s what the UE rate would be right now if we measured it the way it was only about 17 years ago. That’s a DEPRESSION!