The Telegraph ran a very alarming article today on the economy. Made me want to sell everything, buy gold and crawl into a hole.
I had not realised that Decemeber was the worst month for job losses since the Great Depression. The real unemployment rate was no surprise, though. Perhaps it will 20% this summer?
Oh, no worries. Obama says only 85,000 jobs were lost last month holding the unemployment rate steady at 10%. The national media affirms so it must be true. Unless, of course, you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and get the raw data. I wonder why the national media can't, or refuses to do the same? I found this late last week. Glenn Beck highlighted the 843,000 number today, but we all know that Obama says FoxNews doesn't report news and that he'd prefer we rely on MSNBC or CNN instead.
You see the trick is that if the numbers look really bad, the Labor Department can simply erase people from the labor force. Like the 843,000 that simply transitioned from unemployed to "
Not in the labor force" last month.
Note that after a small pre-holiday uptick of temporary workers from October to November, 589,000 Americans actually found themselves unemployed in December, which normally would have increased unemployment to nearly 10.4%. But with 10 times the number deleted from the labor force as officially become employed, it more than offsets the losses. (73,000 increase in unemployed is seasonally-adjusted from the raw 85,000 that the Labor Department admits is too high because of the routine holiday uptick in temporary employment.)
A very telling trend is the
Not in labor force numbers for 3rd to 4th qtr. In a nation with population always increasing, how does the labor force, people employed or looking for work, decrease by 1.35 million people in 3 months? It doesn't! But if you trust the government, you'd never think to ask how they keep the official unemployment number from skyrocketing? Now you know.
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