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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Benchman who wrote (550761)	3/11/2004 8:00:04 PM
From: Steve Dietrich	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

<<If jobs are continuing to being lost, why are the unemployment claims going down? Did these people find a way to live and eat for free??? Or maybe, they actually have gotten jobs.>> You do understand that unemployment benefits expire don't you? And according to the latest household survey 590,000 people dropped out of the labor force, meaning they're not looking for jobs or collecting benefits. When the unemployment rate dropped from 6% to 5.7% it was because 300,000 workers gave up looking for work, not because jobs had been added to the economy. When you count those who have given up looking for work, but would work if they could, the unemployment rate is more like 10%. All this according the Household Survey so beloved by the right. Steve Dietrich

To: Benchman who wrote (550761)	3/11/2004 8:33:19 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Respond to of 769667

Here is an article excerpt (author : John Mauldin). He argues why the REAL unemployment rate is more like 11.8% (I am not sure if he counts students who had never had a job before but are not getting a job after they graduated. If he hasn't, then that will send the REAL unemployment rate even higher..) That loud boom you heard Friday morning coming from the futures pits was the job report imploding the dollar and sending interest rates tumbling. The consensus estimate was for 125,000 new jobs and it came in at a meager 21,000. Most economists think that we need 150,000 new jobs created per month to actually gain ground with population growth. This signals the potential for a weaker economy in the future, thus interest rates drop. A weaker economy also hurts the dollar, and thus the market reaction. Perversely, the stock market seemed to think lower rates are good for stocks in the future, so the broad market ended up sideways, except sadly for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Why did the job report provoke such a strong reaction? Let's take a closer look at what these numbers mean. Some would argue that we should not be whining about unemployment. It is, after all, only 5.6%, which is historically not all that high. But current headline Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rates are not the whole story. The magic of statistics is that if you get to define the terms, you can make the numbers say what you want them to say. No great conspiracy here, but the unemployment numbers are developed in such a way that unemployment is understated. If there was some conspiracy, we would not be able to look at the detailed way in which the numbers are developed. The fact that most commentators do not look beyond the headline number is not a conspiracy. It is laziness. Big difference. The unemployment numbers are useful as they give us a direction of employment, which has been improving, and a basis for historical comparison. But there is more when you look at the underlying actual numbers that make up the statistics and how they are counted. For instance, the BLS does not include people in the category of unemployed who want a job but have not looked for one in the last four weeks. If you add in the people who want a job but are not counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate goes up to 8.8%. There are also 4.4 million people who are working part-time but would like a full-time job. If you add those in also, we have 11.8% of the population who are unemployed or are under-employed. But the statistics are even more ambiguous than that. If you look at the actual numbers for February 2004, you find that the total number of people classified as unemployed went down by 127,000. Doesn't that mean we created 127,000 jobs? The answer is no. Let me throw you some odd statistics. First, since November, the actual labor force (according to the BLS) has dropped by over 700,000, even though the population rose. The number of people actually employed dropped by a seasonally adjusted 265,000. The number of people who are now considered not in the workforce rose by over 500,000.