"Unemployment Is Lower Than The AVERAGE Of The PAST THIRTY YEARS"...

[arwalden]

the Republican shills keep bragging... as though THAT is something to be proud of. Clearly people aren't actually LISTENING to what it is that is being said.

Republicans keep repeating this. They use the same enthusiasm AS IF they were bragging that unemployment was at its lowest point in thirty years. But critical listeners will realize that it IS NOT AT ITS LOWEST POINT.

SOMEONE needs to point out that the Republicans are massaging the numbers. They had to go back THIRTY YEARS in order to find unemployment figures that were BAD ENOUGH to bring the average UP to the horrible unemployment numbers of the Bush* years.

Unfortunately nobody says anything. (Not even Donna Brazile.) And the average Joe just sits there with CNN in the background... not paying attention... and he hears: "blah-blah-blah unemployment is lower blah-blah-blah THIRTY years!!"

Later on, our friend Joe repeats "unemployment is at its lowest in THIRTY YEARS". Pretty soon, this is what everyone believes.

SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING. POINT OUT THE LIES AND DISTORTIONS!!!

-- Allen




Edit: clarity.

[swinney]

1. Unemployment lower than

Clinton's 2.9%??????

[prodigal_green]

3. No

That is the original poster's point--it is not the lowest. They have to include the horrific unemployment figures from Reagan and Bush I to pull that number out of their elephantine heinies.

<edited to add:>
Also, current unemployment figures are totally bogus. Congress refused to extend benefits to people whose unemployment ran out around the New Year.

Does anybody have any reliable figures on LONG TERM unemployment?

[ET Awful]

6. Participation in the labor market is at it's lowest point in . . .

over 15 years. If just 15% of the people that are no longer listed as unemployed because they either quit looking or are no longer eligible for benefits were to rejoin the hunt, the unemployment rate would show as closer to 8%

"Last month, the rate of participation in the labor force dipped to 66 percent, the lowest in more than 15 years. If the participation rate were at its pre-recession peak of 67.4 percent, the December unemployment figure would have been 7.7 percent."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001833939_jobs100.html

"The biggest jobs wild card -- one that threatens to instantly escalate the unemployment rate -- is the growing number of people who aren't counted in the monthly government unemployment rate until they seek work. That group, which currently totals 23.6 million nationwide, could suddenly swell the labor pool, says the head of a major jobs outplacement company.

"All it might take is a spate of favorable hiring news to turn them into job seekers," says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Their entry in the job searchers' pool could quickly elevate the current 5.6 percent national unemployment rate to 7.9 percent, even if only 15 percent of the 23.6 million jobless were to begin job hunting, according to a new analysis released Monday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "

http://eastbay.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2004/02/16/daily6.html

[xray s]

2. You have to look beyond the raw unemployment %

Average wages are falling. Benefits are evaporating. That is an even bigger story that the bogus unemployment figures that come out of Washington.

[atre]

25. Unemployment rate is not useful until you consider the Labor Force

Participation Rate. The unemployment rate does not take into account people who have stopped looking for a job in the last month to three months.

[redqueen]

26. The U-6 figure, which I posted below, does. n/t

[littlejoe]

4. This is a damnable lie. Figures are way skewed.

[lovedems]

5. These jerks can talk all they want. My husband still doesn't have

a job! There aren't to many prospects out there either. He has had a few job offers but the pay would be less then half of what he normally makes. He is a Network Administrator and they want to pay him a help desk salary and give little to no benefits! He has taken a gamble and told those agencies to go screw themselves in the hopes that a REAL job will emerge before his unemployment runs out.

What we are seeing is the "more for less" mentality unfolding.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

7. All the spin in the world

won't put bread on the tables of those without jobs who are no longer eligible to be called unemployed.

[redqueen]

8. Donna - no surprise; Joe - truly not a surprise

Has MacAullife said anything?

*sigh*

And people wonder why the 'fringe' gets irate about lack of representation. Hello?!

[oasis]

9. McDonald's and Burger King jobs reclassfied as "manufacturing" is another

lame attempt by the Bushistas to hide the shameful drop in employment.

[ChiefJoseph]

10. Devil's advocate

It is true, however, that at 5.6% nationally, the unemployment rate today is the same as it was in July 1996, when Clinton was running for re-election on the strength of the economy.

[redqueen]

11. Republican advocate

It's already been pointed out in this very thread how badly massaged that number is by the corporatist cheap labor conservatives in charge ... so why are you using the republican-skewed numbers as proof of anything?

[ChiefJoseph]

13. I didn't see anyone address the fact that the unemployment figure today...

...is the same as it was under Clinton. Show me where that was addressed, please. And if I'm not mistaken, the 5.6% figure is universally accepted.

Anyway, it's a fair point to ask, and asking it does not make me a "Republican." Why are DK supporters so pathologically paranoid?

[redqueen]

14. tsk tsk

you missed this?

Yeah, it's universally accepted as a flawed figure taken from a G.D. phone survey! :eyes:

And if you'll read carefully, you'll notice I didn't call you a republican. I said you were playing republican advocate, since you're using their spin to say it's no worse than under clinton.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[redqueen]

18. Do you always have to resort to insulting people?

Honestly. :eyes:

Yes, you could have a case for just playing 'devil's advocate' if the refutation for such rubbish hadn't been posted in the very same thread.

Quote the whore media headlines all you want, it won't change the fact that your republican spin point was refuted already.

It wasn't valid then, and it still isn't now just because the Reuters said so.

[ChiefJoseph]

20. You're the one who called me a Republican, the worst insult...

...I can think of.

[redqueen]

22. Oh, but I didn't

But don't let facts get in the way of your pity party.

[pacifictiger]

12. I've been wondering why everyone is

so fixated on the people collecting unemployment assistance. That is looking at it through the cup half empty lens. Surely, to put economic employment numbers into context it would make more sense to cite legitimate employment numbers vs population. I would think that would have less numbers game wiggle room and more historical context. Yes? Are these numbers accessible anywhere?

[redqueen]

19. Real unemployment is higher

http://www.perfecteconomy.com/newsletter---2001-11-17--false-unemployment.html

Since I believe the initial failings of the Reagan Administration became apparent, official "economists" count the unemployed from those still collecting unemployment benefits. Any instance of unemployment can only appear on official unemployment rolls over the related benefit period.

If ten people are unemployed in benefit period 1, and another ten are unemployed in benefits limit period 2, only the 10 are "unemployed" — not the 20. Under conditions where the ten are actually re-hired, of course the aberrant process does not produce its most blatant discrepancies. But if they are not rehired, such a blatantly flawed accounting system merely fails to count them.

Which is as to say, the total emissions of an automobile are reflected by only the quantity present in the tail-pipe.

This was a situation of a proper system being broken. Would respectable overseers and "economic" analysts not prefer good data if their intention were genuinely to monitor and regulate a system so as to avoid unemployment? Of this the public should be very suspicious, as the only real way the system is regulated is by raising and lowering instability engendered by interest rates. The masters have rendered this instability by regulating the rate at which debt is multiplied in proportion to commerce.

The result now is commerce and market marginalized to the brink of insoluble debt. And they say, despite fabulous layoffs, that unemployment is not rising, and there will be a recovery early next year.


http://www.cepr.org/pubs/bulletin/MEETS/422.HTM

Above all, perceptions of the severity, incidence, and character of unemployment are influenced by the limited statistics available for the interwar period. These arise primarily from the operation of trade union and unemployment insurance funds and usually focus exclusively on the industrial sector. For most countries (the United States and Canada serving as notable exceptions), such data indicate much higher unemployment rates than population censuses and labour force surveys. Other evidence of this discrepancy can be found in regression estimates of 'Okun's Law' for the interwar period, relating changes in output to changes in unemployment: these regressions imply implausibly large elasticities of unemployment with respect to output.


http://www.underreported.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1092

As with many other news outlets, CNN noted and then explained the paradox in numbers -- that the reported unemployment rate of 6.2% is artificially low because a number of people have given up looking for jobs. But no news outlet has dug deeper, despite that the same Aug. 1, 2003 Bureau of Labor Statistics press release they quoted contains the real unemployment figures.

The BLS maintains six unemployment figures, U-1 through U-6, but the media only report U-3. The most inclusive figure, U-6, the BLS defines as "Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers" where the following definitions apply:

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

The U-6 number for July, 2003 is 10.5%.



http://www.forbes.com/2001/04/06/0406umemployment.html

Nevertheless, corporate America's employees are being shown the door with an alarming frequency. Yesterday, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas sounded the alarm by reporting that March's 167,867 job cuts were triple what they were for that month last year. Even the more conservative and perhaps less headline-hungry Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recorded a 44% jump in layoffs from last February to this February. (March figures have yet to be released.)

So why hasn't a similarly severe uptick in the unemployment rate materialized? Because, although initial jobless claims are growing at what appears to be quite a clip proportionally, the total numbers still represent just a sliver of the 142 million American workforce.

For instance, this March the average number of initial unemployment claims was up 40% over last March. That's a big jump, but the total comes to just 373,000, or three-tenths of one percent of the workforce. Indeed, that figure corresponds exactly with the year over, year rise in the unemployment rate.

Similarly, while Forbes.com's Layoff Tracker has tabulated that Forbes 500 companies have issued 280,812 pink slips since the first of the year, that represents just 1% of the 24.9 million people those companies employ.

[redqueen]

23. And here's the proof from the horse's mouth:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers......................................... 9.9

[mzmolly]

15. Actually this generally happens when thugs are in office because...

they calculate unemployment based on who is receiving UNemp checks. When the time limits are up, and people are no longer receiving checks. They are no longer counted in the grand tally. :(

[redqueen]

24. This is how it's done under any administration

And in most countries around the world.

I think Clinton did make some improvements, but I can't recall off the top of my head what they were. Regardless, they were FAR from sufficient.

[Forkboy]

16. Well,my local paper said last week

that here in Central Ma the number is 9.2%

Needless to say I feel the Repubs are full of shit.

[shivaji]

21. Job numbers are wrong anyway because they do NOT count

persons who are self employed, those who run a business out of a garage,
and those who work for a small businessman who is not incorporated as a
business. The government number for employed is based on survey of mostly
larger comanies. Thus it could be skewed significantly in either direction.