Unemployment falls below 9%

Robert Prey said:
No. Figures don't lie; but Liars, figure.
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Ah, so it is a Conspiracy to lie? How many people do you suppose are in on it? How do they keep them quiet? How many people have they had to murder to keep this out of the press? The answers will be most illuminating, but it's Saturday morning, so go watch your cartoons; you can answer later.
 
Robert Prey said:
Yes. The real unemployment number is more like 23 percent:
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Irrelevant.

U3 is the number that is reported by media as 'unemployment' , and the number that people will pay attention to and use to gauge the state of the country at election time.
 
BenBurch said:
Ah, so it is a Conspiracy to lie? How many people do you suppose are in on it? How do they keep them quiet? How many people have they had to murder to keep this out of the press? The answers will be most illuminating, but it's Saturday morning, so go watch your cartoons; you can answer later.
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It's not actually a lie, since they're telling the truth about "unemployment" as they have defined it (and they've told us how they define it too). Nor is it necessary to keep anyone quiet about it, most people will willingly use their definition rather than alternative definitions. And lastly, it hasn't actually been kept out of the press.

When things are done in plain sight, it's not exactly a conspiracy.
 
Robert Prey said:
Yes. The real unemployment number is more like 23 percent:
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Not for purposes of comparing to the unemployment rates reported since March of '09--unless you use the "real" number to compare to, in which case 23% is probably still a 3-year low. [ETA: I see by the chart you provided from the "ShadowStats" website that it's not so with the SGS figure but it is with the U3 and U6 figures.]

For better or worse, this is the rate that is used to report U.S. unemployment. Comparing this reported rate historically to other estimates now is meaningless.
 
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Ziggurat said:
Oh, that's definitely a big part of it. But unemployment is still going to be quite important. The higher unemployment is, the better Obama will need to do on all that other stuff. But there's no reason to think there are any cutoffs, and specific numbers which will change the situation discretely. I'm not trying to suggest that you're arguing otherwise, I'm just adding this for clarification.
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I agree. I was speaking sort of tongue-in-cheek saying the unemployment figure would make Obama a shoo-in, but it's really about the strongest thing any of the GOP candidates would have to use in the election campaign. It's pretty tough to run on "repeal the jobs killing healthcare reform law" when it's not killing jobs. (And of course if Newt gets the nomination, Obama's a shoo-in anyway.)
 
Brainster said:
Let's hear what Paul Krugman has to say:



And:



Okay, just kidding; obviously that 200,000 figure is wildly optimistic, and Krugman wasn't talking about Barack Obama; he was snorting at the idea of President Bush adding that many jobs per month, eight years ago.

Bush did manage to avoid going down with Hoover on job creation; by my estimate Obama will need about 1.6 million new jobs by next year to dodge that fate himself.
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Why quote Krugman from eight years ago and not this week?
 
As long as the number of people applying for benefits stays low or drops, it looks like a recovery.

The republiucons have a fix for that, though.

They are doing everything in their power to fire as many public sector employees as they possibly can, regardless how it harms the ability of government agencies to function.

That is the take-home message from the failure of the Stupor Committee.
 
leftysergeant said:
The republiucons have a fix for that, though.

They are doing everything in their power to fire as many public sector employees as they possibly can, regardless how it harms the ability of government agencies to function.
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I have actually had RWnuts tell me 1) the government is broken and 2) the way to fix it is to fire half of them and cut the rest's salary in half.

Yeah, because that's going to make it work all so much better... :boxedin:
 
Muldur said:
As several people have pointed out, the falling "official" UE rate is not the same as falling UE. The falling rate is the direct result of people either giving up their job search or running out of UE benefits. Both categories are excluded from the "official" UE rate, but both are still unemployed.
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Pointing this out is one thing, justifying it as meaningful is quite another. So far no one has simply presented the factoid and not bothered to argue it has any particular meaning other than a vaguely CT’ish implication that the official results should be ignored.
 
daredelvis said:
Not by a long shot. I will take years to get us out of the Bush recession, especially with the GOP congress being led by a bunch of yahoos possessing an economic education consisting solely of having read Atlas Shrugged.

Daredelvis
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What's worse most didn't actually read the book, just the one page synopsis of carefully cherry-picked quotes.
 
daredelvis said:
...I will take years to get us out of the Bush recession, especially with the GOP congress being led by a bunch of yahoos possessing an economic education consisting solely of having read Atlas Shrugged.
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A. There are few free marketeers in leadership positions in either party.
B. If this is "the Bush recession", what Bush administration policies does "...elvis" suggest brought this on?
Let's anticipate some answers:...

1. War
2. Mortgage subsidies and the housing bubble
3. The prescription drug benefit
4. Crippling regulation of commerce
I'd add
5. (Subcategory of #4) The massive increase in the federally-mandated minimum wage.
6. Other _____ (specify).

If the Federal Reserve's expansion of the money supply indicates an intention to annul the minimum wage increase through inflation and to disguise a default on dollar-denominated debts through inflation, then this will indeed take years to accomplish without major pain.

C. Since Europe, Russian, Japan, Argentina, and China face economic difficulties, "the Bush recession" looks like a misattribution to me.
 
TheL8Elvis said:
...U3 is the number that is reported by media as 'unemployment' , and the number that people will pay attention to and use to gauge the state of the country at election time.
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They don't have to change the definition of "unemployment" if that term is defined in terms of factors that change in response to other policy changes (such as the value of welfare benefits). The "unemployment" numbers can be manipulated through policy changes that do nothing to affect labor force participation or aggregate productivity or that even make these numbers worse.

Does anyone track a figure like "total paid (private sector) hours"? That is, the sum of all compensated private sector labor hours.
 
Peephole said:
Why quote Krugman from eight years ago and not this week?
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Because Krugman switches arguments depending on which party determines the policy he wants to criticize/laud. Republican debt = trouble. Democrat debt = stimulus. He was right about Republican debt. He was right about the impact of tax-subsidized unemployment benefits in his textbook, and wrong about it in his NYT column.
 
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Malcolm Kirkpatrick said:
A. There are few free marketeers in leadership positions in either party.
B. If this is "the Bush recession", what Bush administration policies does "...elvis" suggest brought this on?
Let's anticipate some answers:...

1. War
2. Mortgage subsidies and the housing bubble
3. The prescription drug benefit
4. Crippling regulation of commerce I'd add
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Didn't happen. Only idiots think that the problem was too much regulation. Clearly, it was NOT ENOUGH regulation of the financial sector.
5. (Subcategory of #4) The massive increase in the federally-mandated minimum wage.
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That actually helped a lot of small businesses from going belly-up. Nobody with any sense thinks that caused the depression.
6. Other _____ (specify).
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Some bunch of whacktards decided that a tax cut at the outset of a war was a good idea.

C. Since Europe, Russian, Japan, Argentina, and China face economic difficulties, "the Bush recession" looks like a misattribution to me.
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Cow cookies. His idiotic ecconomic policies dragged the rest of the world down.
 
BenBurch said:
That is one sleep-inducing book. I read it in College and I don't think I got through two chapters at once without getting sleepy.
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I don't think anyone I've ever known has confused Ayn Rand with Gordon R. Dickson, for good reason. That is about the only positive thing I can say about the "Atlas Shrugged" movie,...it was very true to the book. Garet Garrett did much better in "the Driver," where he at least portrayed both sides of the capitalist coin.
 
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