Unemployment is not best LW stat.. "Job Shortage " is better

[oscar111]

If you use the unemployment figure, that lets Rush say, "they are lazy bums. Look at all the job opening ads ... pages of them. No excuse to be jobless ".

The way to answer Rush is not to use unemployment stats in the first place.

Nullify his "pages and pages" comment right off by using the stat "Job Shortage", which combines both the number of jobless and the number of job openings.

Fact is, there are very few open jobs, compared to the jobless who are looking for work. Four million vs. seventeen million.

Those "pages and pages" are far fewer than the number of jobless reading the paper looking for a job.

See my sig for unimpeachable gov statistic source. Job Openings , nationwide, from the D of Labor. The DOL site has it at the upper right, called "Job Openings Level". It varies over time of course, and today there are four million openings.

A sharp LW defender uses the stat "Job Shortage". Sad that so many LWers still use the inferior MSM statistic.

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PS.. Who's to blame for the millions unemployed? The Rush/MSM statistic leaves open the door to blaming "the lazy bums", the jobless themselves.

But the new statistic, "Job Shortage", clearly puts the full blame right on those who run the economy. The jobless clearly don't have the power to create a shortage of jobs.

[area51]

1. How true.

People who've searched for a job know that there's a shortage of jobs. And if the jobs market was so great, employers would be ratcheting up salaries & perks, instead of shit-canning them.

[Sammy Pepys]

2. I don't think "job shortage" is all that great a stat....

Very few open jobs can be interpreted any number of ways. So can an excess of job openings.

What might be a better stat is the avergae starting salary of those open jobs.