Truly anemic payroll growth was reported on Friday Morning September 07, 2007. After a plethora of manipulation, the August 2007 growth in employment was negative 4,000 jobs. Every month we need around 125,000 new jobs to be created and filled to keep up with working age population increase. Every time we produce fewer new jobs, opportunity contracts. The short hand way such things are measured is on our broken and defective unemployment rate. Across August 2007 we produced about 130,000 to few jobs. We missed our target by 104%! The national unemployment rate must have risen, right? Wrong. It stayed the same.
Our measure of unemployment is clearly and badly broken. We had 4.5%-4.6% unemployment for the last few months as job growth stagnated and turned down. The average new job creation from June-August is now 44,000 per month. That royally stinks. Our metric, unemployment, stinks even more as it has entirely failed to capture this. 592,000 more of your fellow American were not in the civilian labor force in August, as compared to June. They are not counted as employed or as unemployed. The civilian labor force declined by 340,000 across the last 3 months. Our unemployment measure obscures this from view. Nice measure!
Our official unemployment rate is a widely reported mis-measure. There are many reasons for this. A simple introduction to the problem must include the following. We only count people that are not employed, have actively looked in the last 4 weeks and are in the labor force. It has become very easy to fall out of the labor force. All those folks falling out of the labor force fall out of work and out of consideration. Numbers are then adjusted up for an estimation of all the folks that must be getting hired by themselves with new business start-ups. This is called the birth/day provision and involves scaling down the official unemployment numbers to account for folks starting their own business. People are also said to be working if they did any paid work at all or, unpaid work over 15 hours on a farm, in a family business etc. Everything about our measure is designed to push down the reported unemployment rate.
No amount of magic made the August numbers look good! Let's check in with wages and salaries and see if that was a bright spot. Perhaps you will be cheered to know that your fellow Americans are, on average, taking home an extra $1.69 per week. This should really help offset the damage from a weak job market, housing turmoil and rising interest rates on adjustable rate home mortgages. One very special person thinks it will, your President.
The fundamentals of America's economy are strong - economic growth is healthy, wages are rising, and unemployment is low. -- August 31, 2007 Press Briefing.
As housing markets continue down and economic contagion spreads pain and disappointment we will be watching to see how candidate opinion and proposals shift. Now, more even than a few weeks ago, the economy looms large in election 2008.
Good luck!
You are so right shrinker - good news or bad - what a breath of fresh air and a relief the truth would have been. I've been hearing loud silences and whispers for some time. . .disturbing.
The rotten leaders have been cooking the books.
This refusal to have honest government infers that the ordinary American citizen is no longer part of the equation of governance. If political leaders can safely distort and lie the actual condition of the people and distract them with bogus issues, the citizens may be blinded and deluded until it is too late for repair. Such is the state of our self governance scheme.
Gross self delusion and corruption suffocate the nuturing of honest, open and modern leadership. And the Republic atrophies.
Finally, in a period of crisis resulting from unaddressed issues, the flame of self governance is replaced by the actions of a magnamious savior emboldened by a chorus of adulating sycophants and other riotous citizens who shout down desenters while instilling the charismatic demigogue with unlimited power while praising the blessings of liberty.
For your amusement:
http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs?
The MSM usually report what their sources tell them, and those sources have an incentive {making themselves look good} to understate the unemployment rate.
Wages are stagnet the average wages will begin dropping as TRUCKERS start to feeling the loss of income because of MEXICAN TRUCKERS driving loads deep into the USA.
GOOD BY SWEET MIDDLE CLASS, YOU WERE SO NICE FOR SO LONG.
BUT NOW YOU LEAVING.
GOOD BYE SWEET HEART GOOD BYE.
What might be useful is to illustrate how the means by which we measure “unemployment” became so misleading. A good post for you for another day, but briefly, Reagan began kicking people off the unemployment tally when it became clear that his economic policies were not producing the capitalist miracle that he had promised. In truth he probably believed his pitch, but it did not, could not, and will not work. So, rather than do the honorable thing and admit a lifetime of mad obsession was wrong, he simply started cooking the books. And, not just on unemployment, the CPI also felt his wraith, it not showing the “truths” he held to be self evident either.
There is a vast untold story here, one that has upheld the lie that is the Reagan hold on the political and economic throat of Americans, and not just the Democrats.