The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

[robertpaulsen]

The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch. Posted February 11, 2009.

snip

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed, because some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs, and it shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two-month count of Americans who lost jobs at 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the U.S. media is a fabrication. Williams reports that in changes since 1980, particularly in the Clinton era,

" 'Discouraged workers' -- those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had -- were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been 'discouraged' for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, rose to 18 percent in January, from 17.5 percent in December."

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data, the U.S. unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126319/the_real_jobless_rate_is_18_percent/

[Royal Sloan 09]

1. K n R

Yes, I concur, being part of the discouraged group, that's not counted, but still looking. Big D indeed!

[Vincardog]

3. Yes, I concur, being part of the discouraged group, that's not counted, but still looking. Big D ind

[bleever]

2. This bears repeating again and again.

K&R.

[Daveparts]

4. Don't Forget

that students graduating from school are not unemployed, you must first have a job before you can lose it.

[Mnemosyne]

5. KnR. n/t

[Zynx]

6. I would point out this is nowhere close to the definition used during the Depression so do not

come close to making the mistake that we are at those sorts of levels. That is a huge huge misnomer. We are worse than 7.6%, but to say we are at 18% and therefore just 6% below Depression levels is a significant stretch of the truth.

[robertpaulsen]

7. How is it different?