WILL WRESTLE YOUR MOTHER IN LAW FOR A BUCK! –Unemployed beggar at truck stop in Southern California

So, the unemployment rate has dropped below 9% to 8.6%. Why am I less than  excited by this? The unemployment rate is based on the number of people who are  considered to be in the workforce, so if you eliminate people from the workforce who are unemployed, the percentage employed is skewed to the right. In other words,  So, most of the drop is due not to the imaginary job creators of Republican lore,  legend and myth, but due to people giving up after months of trying, running out of  unemployment benefits and falling off the grid and under the bus. In other words, a  historically low number of workers are doing less badly, while there’s an increase in  people who are literally just waiting to die.

American governments at all levels continued to bleed workers, for one.  And the decline in the unemployment rate had a down side: It fell partly  because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers  dropped out of the labor force. That left the share of Americans actively  participating in the work force at a historically depressed 64 percent,  down from 64.2 percent in October.Even excluding these hundreds of  thousands of dropouts, the country still had a backlog of more than 13  million unemployed workers, whose spells of unemployment averaged  an all-time high of 40.9 weeks. “They say businesses are refusing to look  at résumés from the unemployed,” said Esther Perry, 59, of Bedford,  Mass., who participated in a recent report on unemployed workers put  together by USAction, a liberal coalition. “What do you think my chances are? Once unemployment runs out, I don’t know what I will do.”

Do the Occupied folks stay in the Workforce? Probably not — while they’re doing their thing, exercising their constitutional rights and getting pepper sprayed and beaten and shot with rubber bullets and so on, they’re not looking for work or, conversely, they are working, just not getting paid. See how much fun this is? Statistics measure what you measure — basing policy decisions on them or making political decisions on them — THE PRESIDENT”S CHANCES FOR RE-ELECTION IMPROVE AS UNEMPLOYMENT DIPS! — without asking some structural, almost existential questions about what these things mean is really stupid, and I’m sure we’ll all work at being stupid soon, 24/7 on cable news, blogs like this one and talk radio.

So, here’s the test — who do you know who’s unemployed and you don’t understand why? When they get a job, assume that the unemployment rate may be going down. Whom do you know who hates their job — trick question, the stats that I have seen are pretty straight and seem confirmed by reality, just about everybody hates their job. However, pick someone who’s dramatically underpaid, overworked and unhappy…see when they get a raise. Or feel comfortable quitting their job to look for a new one. Then what’s happening is an actual increase in employment, as opposed to an artifical decline in a rate.

 

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: diatribes // Add Comment »