“Cooking the Books” on Unemployment

By Rod Pennington

Today the Labor Department announced the country lost 125,000 jobs in June then claims the unemployment rate had fallen to 9.5 percent, the lowest rate in eleven months.

"How Convenient!"

How can we possibly lose that many jobs and the unemployment rate still go down?

Easy, the Labor Department decided that 652,000 unemployed folks should no longer be counted in the unemployment stats. They say these people have given up their job search and are no longer looking for work.

If you actually look at the report you have to scratch your head. According to the Labor Department in June 2009, 140,826,000 people were employed and 15,095,000 were unemployed. In June 2010, 139,119,000 people were employed and 14,623,000 were unemployed. Over the course of one year, the country has lost 1.7 million jobs but unemployment has fallen by 472,000.

To keep the jobless rate low enough to keep from making the boss look bad, 2.1 million people vanished from the stats.

As the “Church Lady” used to say of “Saturday Night Live”, “how convenient.”

Some have estimated the “True” unemployment rate may be north of 22%. The Labor Department is willing to admit we have lost 7.9 million jobs since the recession began and over 2 million of those since the government passed its $787 billion “Stimulus” plan.  To add 652,000 people to their “discouraged” list this close to an election doesn’t pass the smell test.

Short URL: http://yoursinglesourcefornews.com/?p=1372

Posted by Rod Pennington on Jul 2 2010. Filed under Business & Finance, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry