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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (200181)	9/4/2004 10:07:46 AM
From: SilentZ	Respond to of 1573532

>Let's do the math: if you are right and 150,000 people did enter workforce, 6,000 of the did not find work yet, or 4%. 4% is less than the current unemployment so the overall unemployment should drop, and it did. So what is the problem? If you only include August... you'd get a very small percentage drop in unemployment, but... From your article: "Employment figures for June and July -- still relatively lackluster -- were revised to show a combined 169,000 net jobs were created in those two months -- 59,000 more than previously reported." If you do the calculation for the last three months, even with the revision, you have 137,000 people that did not find work out of the 450,000 that entered the workforce. So, unemployment should rise a bit. >You are either missing something, misstating something, out of your depth in basic arithmetic, or full of shit. No -- people who are "long-term unemployed" (i.e. past their unemployment benefit) drop out of the workforce numbers, and last time I saw statistics on that, back in 2003, we had the largest number of "long-term unemployed" in a long time. Also, people who give up on finding a job so they go back to school instead don't count in the workforce, either. Only anecdotally, I can say that's widespread. I just had dinner with a friend, and we were exchanging employment stories about our friends -- we're all two, three years out of college... she said that she was the only one of her friends other than me that's gainfully full-time employed, and where does she work? (Uggghhh...) Bechtel. In fact, she's supporting Bush because "wars are important to her job." I know many of her college-grad friends (she has an MBA), and the ones that don't work for Bechtel, if they've found a job at all, it's as a lifeguard or substitute teacher. She's one of three friends of mine from high school and college that has a good full-time job, and one of the other two is in the Army. All of the rest of my friends are either living off of their parents or took a year or two off and didn't find anything, so they went to grad school. Not because they couldn't get a job at all, but because people who went to Ivy League and other high-caliber schools do not want to take ten dollar/hour jobs bartending or entering data. Five-six years ago, they wouldn't have had to. -Z