Unemployment and Jobs Report

The media has done a lot of work to try and convince the American people we are pulling out of this recession. Everytime there is a government report with some positive news or the stock market moves up for a week or two, they are quick to say on TV "Are we finally coming out of this recession???". But then there is this jobs report from April. It estimates that 260,000 jobs were added to the economy, but unemployment went up to 9.9%. How is this possible?

The unemployment number is a joke. It counts only people drawing unemployment from State and Federal unemployment insurance. If you are not drawing insurance, like say if you just graduated college and haven't paid into it, you are not counted. If you have given up looking for a job after your unemployment ran out, you are not counted. If you are working part time and are dying for a full time job, you are not counted. That 9.9% is a pretty high number in historical terms, but what is sad is that its a low-ball estimate of the true misery in the US economy.

Adding in the millions who have left the labor force because they can't find a job and have given up, those who have taken major cuts to hours, and others, the real unemployment rate in the United States is 17.1% and is the highest it has been in over 30 years.

What about the confusing jobs and unemployment reports? Jobs were created, but a lot of people have decided to re-enter the labor force after leaving it for the last couple months, or longer. So of 260,000 jobs created, it may be that about 500,000 people are now looking for jobs that weren't before (don't know for sure, just guessing). The total number of "discouraged" workers numbers in the millions. So added it all up and we would need to add at least 500,000 jobs per month for several years to get back to 6% unemployment. Not likely.

Americans don't need a jobs or unemployment report to tell us that things are very rough. We don't need the media to tell us how the economy is doing, or to convince us that we are either still in recession or we aren't. We know the truth. Whatever they say is according to government-produced numbers. They aren't lying, but consider the source and consider that any capable statistician and skew the numbers to show a more favorable result.

Projections are not good. Stock Market is still stuck at 10,000-11,000 which is basically where it was in 2008, so in the last two years we have done nothing but climb out of the pit to where we were in terms of value. Nothing to be happy about. Most economists and experts predict that we will not see unemployment decline below 9% well into 2011, which means the REAL unemployment will stay at 15-17% for at least another year.

Can we please accept that fact that the Stimulus Package failed, even better that Washington's entire economic policy since 2008 has failed to turn us around, meanwhile they have spent trillions of taxpayer dollars trying to do just that. Normally I would argue that Washington is not responsible for the ebb and flow of the economic cycle, but in this case they stuck their necks out with the Stimulus, TARP, bailouts, and all sorts of other expensive and aggressive programs to turn this economy around. All of it at our expense by the way.

The American people need to stop tossing cash into the money pit. Two years later the house is still falling apart.