The Government wants to present the appearance of an ongoing recovery so, in true Captain Picard fashion, they simply give the order: "Make it so." Today's employment report from the BLS is a typical example. Jobs contracted for the 24th consecutive month. The BLS admitted that we lost 85,000 jobs from payroll reports in December. But the news that never gets reported is that the actual labor force shrinkage was ten times that!
The numbers are there, right in the BLS tables themselves, but they are just quietly ignored. The "Civilian Labor Force" shrunk by another 661,000. These are workers who haven't met the strict guideline the BLS holds for being considered "unemployed." You have to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed by the BLS. If you get discouraged, and haven't put an application in in recent weeks, you are simply not counted as being out of a job any longer. You are therefore "dropped from the labor force." This is statistical delusion at best, statistical fraud at worst. The BLS is guilty of both.
Beyond this, the total of all people no longer counted in the labor force for December, (which includes all categories, not just civilian) came to 843,000. And Marketwatch reported: "The number of people who've been unemployed for longer than six months rose by 229,000 to 6.13 million, representing a record 39.8% of 15.3 million who are classified as unemployed." Requests for emergency unemployment assistance funds are skyrocketing. People are just not able to find productive employment.
So the headline U-3 unemployment number of 10% really just tracks what percent of the work force are out of a job AND actively seeking a new job by putting in applications. Add in the folks out of work who have given up looking and you get the U-6 number of 17.3% unemployed. Throw out the manipulated "birth / death" calculation where the BLS just estimates how many new jobs are created or lost, and you get the real unemployment number as we end 2009, a whopping 22.7%.
This unemployment curve is now the deepest of any post WWII recession. In fact, it is Depression era pain, and it arrived much sooner than in the 1930s. It took three years for the unemployment number to break 20% after the crash of 1929. We are now just 15 months beyond the crash of 2008.
Those familiar with statistical charting will easily see the real story of our unemployment picture in this excellent chart provided by Calculated Risk:
The red line is our current "Recession," and the remaining lines show all previous recessions. Note the recovery trajectories. Now mentally draw in the red line, assuming it makes a gradual approach to the mean of zero, where it was before the recession began. Job recovery to that level would take at least another 24 months, but to achieve that we have to add at least 100,000 new jobs per month. We are still losing jobs and shrinking the work force by droping unemployed people from the rolls to fudge that data.
This is not an Op Ed. It is not my "opinion." The statistics tell the tale in simple math. While we may be at the bottom of our current job loss cycle for this downturn, we are still very far from "recovery" to normal levels. But if you want to think otherwise you can join the ranks of Winston Smiths at the BLS and simply "Make It So." (I refer, of course, to the famous main character of Orwell's landmark novel 1984, who's job it was to rewrite news items so they accorded with current government views.) Me? I'd rather be an "unperson" and simply tell the truth.
The numbers are there, right in the BLS tables themselves, but they are just quietly ignored. The "Civilian Labor Force" shrunk by another 661,000. These are workers who haven't met the strict guideline the BLS holds for being considered "unemployed." You have to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed by the BLS. If you get discouraged, and haven't put an application in in recent weeks, you are simply not counted as being out of a job any longer. You are therefore "dropped from the labor force." This is statistical delusion at best, statistical fraud at worst. The BLS is guilty of both.
Beyond this, the total of all people no longer counted in the labor force for December, (which includes all categories, not just civilian) came to 843,000. And Marketwatch reported: "The number of people who've been unemployed for longer than six months rose by 229,000 to 6.13 million, representing a record 39.8% of 15.3 million who are classified as unemployed." Requests for emergency unemployment assistance funds are skyrocketing. People are just not able to find productive employment.
So the headline U-3 unemployment number of 10% really just tracks what percent of the work force are out of a job AND actively seeking a new job by putting in applications. Add in the folks out of work who have given up looking and you get the U-6 number of 17.3% unemployed. Throw out the manipulated "birth / death" calculation where the BLS just estimates how many new jobs are created or lost, and you get the real unemployment number as we end 2009, a whopping 22.7%.
This unemployment curve is now the deepest of any post WWII recession. In fact, it is Depression era pain, and it arrived much sooner than in the 1930s. It took three years for the unemployment number to break 20% after the crash of 1929. We are now just 15 months beyond the crash of 2008.
Those familiar with statistical charting will easily see the real story of our unemployment picture in this excellent chart provided by Calculated Risk:
The red line is our current "Recession," and the remaining lines show all previous recessions. Note the recovery trajectories. Now mentally draw in the red line, assuming it makes a gradual approach to the mean of zero, where it was before the recession began. Job recovery to that level would take at least another 24 months, but to achieve that we have to add at least 100,000 new jobs per month. We are still losing jobs and shrinking the work force by droping unemployed people from the rolls to fudge that data.
This is not an Op Ed. It is not my "opinion." The statistics tell the tale in simple math. While we may be at the bottom of our current job loss cycle for this downturn, we are still very far from "recovery" to normal levels. But if you want to think otherwise you can join the ranks of Winston Smiths at the BLS and simply "Make It So." (I refer, of course, to the famous main character of Orwell's landmark novel 1984, who's job it was to rewrite news items so they accorded with current government views.) Me? I'd rather be an "unperson" and simply tell the truth.
