16% Unemployment In America?
Author: Ernie Fitzpatrick
Ah the games we do play. Two plus two equals four unless you would like it to be six. Statistics are whatever one says they are regardless of what they really are. And that goes for the phony government statistics regardless of which party is in power. Politics is about control and maintaining power, regardless of what that may take to be accomplished. Let’s take the unemployment rate as an example.
The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday. “If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.
SIXTEEN PER CENT!
Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent. Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.
Lockhart said the US economy was improving but “still fragile,” and the beginning stages of a sluggish recovery were underway. “My forecast for a slow recovery implies a protracted period of high unemployment,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to stimulate jobs through additional public spending. “Further fiscal stimulus has been mentioned, but the full effects of the first stimulus package are not yet clear, and the concern over adding to the federal deficit and the resulting national debt is warranted,” he said.
President Barack Obama’s administration has resisted calls for more public spending, arguing that the 787-billion-dollar stimulus passed in February needs time to work its way through the economy. Construction and manufacturing has been particularly hard hit in the recession that began in December 2007 and some jobs are gone for good. Prior to the recession, construction and manufacturing combined accounted for slightly more than 15 percent of employment. But during the recession, their job losses made up more than 40 percent of all US job losses.
But, even many who are now employed are working for much less than they once were.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/economics-articles/16-unemployment-in-america-1172250.html
About the Author:
As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.
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