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To: Brad Bolen who wrote (32450)	4/11/1999 11:27:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86076

Brad: If the US did their statistics the same way Canada did, according to the Canadian gov, the US has double-digit unemployment. I found the methodology and stats documented in the Vancouver sunday paper a few months ago, I apologize that I don't have it that I can e-mail you. The feds have been gradually changing their unemployment statistics and CPI calculation to make the numbers come out right. Why would they do this? you ask. Well, Greenspan's charter is to keep inflation under control, maintain employment and pay the bills when they come due on the deficit. Greenspan's biggest bill and the one that is driving the govt toward bankruptcy is Social Security and Medicare, and they are payments that are cost-of-living adjusted with inflation. So he is a genius when he (1) makes inflation go to zero...this eliminates the COLA from social security, drives bond yields to 3% so he doesn't have to pay out so much, the value of the government's reserve holdings suddenly double and voila! social security is rescued.. he does this by modifying the CPI numbers through "deflation". predatory-priced contributions from big multinationals don't hurt. (2) maintain reasonable employment...no rules here about how to modify the statistics to get the right numbers... (3) pay the debt...taxes from inflated holdings of internet stocks don't hurt. Our unemployment only counts people collecting unemployment checks..so it doesn't count underemployed, temporarily disabled, etc. Here in the Bay Area, more than half the available jobs pay less then $24,000 a year while the median cost of a house must be over $350,000. So there's a chunk of people who stay on public assistance to literally get free rent...this is why immigration is a big deal here, it's the only way to find people who will take some of the jobs. There's a serious skills mismatch in some industries. But if you look at the middle-management and skilled labor and manufacturing sectors, there's been huge layoffs, I've spent a lot of time looking at the statistics and it seems that the high-paying administrative jobs are being replaced with low-paying service jobs, in general. There also appears to be a good chunk of people like myself who simply drop out of the statistical pool. An example: microsoft with its market cap of half-trillion and 15,000 employees is not going to absorb the 40,000 aerospace workers that Boeing, with its market cap of oh-$40B are about to dump. Skills mismatch. Those Boeing jobs paid real good cash and not stock, it's not likely those people will be absorbed quickly at the same economic level.