Now, the federal government says we have an estimated 14.8 million unemployed, out of a work force of about 154 million. But that number is artificially lower than in the Great Depression because 33 million senior citizens are on Social Security — and not seeking jobs as they were then. An additional 7.4 million adults receive disability payments under Social Security, and some would also have been seeking work in 1933. But that’s not all. We have a far larger standing military than in 1933 — about 1 percent of the work force, or 1.4 million men and women. Another 1.6 million people are in jails and prisons, a near-record amount, and again a larger percentage of able-bodied U.S. residents than in 1933. They are excluded from the statistics today. In other words, 43.4 million people are paid for government employment in the military, or supported through government programs. If added to the jobless numbers, it equals about 58 million people. --- That's ridiculous math. You're going to count seniors, the military, and people in jail AGAINST employment? Why on earth would you add that to the jobless numbers? And she does that, and has the balls to end with this: Maybe that’s one reason why the American people are so angry at their leaders. They know that many of the government statistics are often just statistical sleight-of-hand. Irony, thy name is Kristin Downey
Hmm, I suppose we could use another few National Parks. . . or maybe we could have another war? It's gonna take tiiiiiiiiiime. . .a whole lotta precious time. . ., it's gonna take patience and time. . .
Because government is bad, mkay? right? Actually, I was interested to see the "low-education" (no college degree) subset had an unemployment rate of up to 30% (!!!), while college grads were closer to 5%. When combined with the current situation where to be a "journalist" in mainstream media, you pretty much need a college degree (and hang out with your peers or betters) - well that surely makes one wonder about how the news is presented if the presenters never really interact with the plebs. The news business is a lot different than that days when a "Joe Plumber" worked their way from the mailroom to getting a voice. It would be good to see more "Joe Plumbers" (ie, salt of the earth folks) have proportionate representation in nightly news or newspapers. Joe Plumber may have been a wackjob, but it would be good to see more than a n=1 subset having a mainstream media voice.
This is good news indeed. Instead of an approximate increase of 94% in unemployment percentage from 2008 of 5% to 2010 of 9.7% we now only have an approximate 13.8% increase in the rate from 33.9% unemployment in 2008 to 37.6% unemployment now. Things are now 6.8 times less bad today then yesterday. Oh, and the Great Depression must not have been all that great and my grandparents were just a bunch of whiners(just like I had always thought). Seeing that 'real' jobless rate since then has always been greater than it was at that time. The Great Depression was actually the zenith of modern America. A time we should be trying to move towards instead of always trying to avoid.
George Will once had a column about this phenomenon. He argued that before the civil rights movement of the 1960's, a lot of job qualification tests existed and they were the basis for hiring more often than college degrees. Then it was found that blacks and minorities did so poorly on these tests that they were dropped because they were racist. But companies and organizations still needed some kind of minimum requirement to hire competent people, so they turned to minimum college education requirements. As a consequence, he argued, even bigger barriers to hiring minorities and the poor were erected since college is so expensive. Obviously Will writes with a pro-Republican bias, but it sounded like a topic worthy of more serious consideration.