Title get your attention? Good. Because the real question my title begs is this one: What jobs?
They (i.e., our government in the “person” of the Bureau of Labor Statistics) tell us that the current rate of unemployment in the United States, seasonally adjusted, is 6.7%, the worst since 1993, which is bad enough. However, the way unemployment in America is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed dramatically since 1994 when the unemployment rate was modernized under the Clinton Administration.
Back in 1994, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics changed how it gauged unemployment, choosing to exclude “discouraged workers.” That means people available and eager to work but who, after a year of looking, have given up because they cannot find a job. The Clinton administration just chopped these discouraged workers out of the most commonly reported statistic on unemployment.
The figure now used – the official rate (which today clocked in at 6.7%) – is called U3 in BLS jargon. […] [I]t’s labeled “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”
In other words, there are substantial numners of people who don’t get counted as unemployed simply because they’ve stopped looking for work or who are unemployed but no longer collect unemployment benefits (and thus are deemed to be “discouraged workers”). So what our government (and the media) labels the official “unemployment rate” today (i.e., the now ubiquitous U3) scarcely resembles what was reported as unemployment back in the day:
U3 is the “official unemployment rate” according to the BLS website. Due to this, it is the current measure of Unemployment that gets focused upon by most media, and therefore the public. It has, over the years, slowly excluded many of the factors that USED to go into how the US reported unemployment. Hence, there has been a gradual decrease in the Unemployment rate that has occurred regardless of what was happening in the Jobs market.
U3 is now comprised in a way that merely repeating it without a slew of caveats borders on fraud.
So what’s the real unemployment rate in America? It’s probably closer to 13 percent than to 6.7 percent.
(cont.)
The Labor Department does publish an alternate measure of unemployment, which counts part-time workers who want full-time work, as well as anyone who has looked for work in the last year. (The official rate includes only people who told a government surveyor that they had looked in the last four weeks.)
This alternate measure rose to 12.5 percent in November. That is the highest level since the government began calculating the measure in 1994. […]
And other economists have measured the de facto rate of US unemployment as high as 16.5%:
The news media is happily parroting the official government pronouncements and those of its minions … and so they all join together to report that unemployment is 6.7%, while just up the street, the McKinsey Global Institute says that it estimates that the unemployment rate in the United States is actually 16.25%, and here’s John Williams at shadowstats.com putting it at 16.5%!
In short, the situation is far worse that anyone in government or the media will tell you. Our true unemployment situation right now is likely as bad as its been in six decades. We lost of a half a million jobs in November and by all accounts we may be shedding over a million jobs a month in the coming new year. Maybe it’s time for some “straight talk” about the real unemployment crisis we face. Using better, more inclusive statistics would be a good place to start. Haven’t we had enough of smoke and mirrors when it comes to talking about our economic condition?
