âThe rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six monthsâreferred to as the long-term unemployedâtopped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.â Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/unemploym...omics-real-unemployment-hits-15#ixzz1maXHzJ47
I am really confused by this... How and who would describe this information as "new"? What is the epiphany here, exactly?
According to John Williams at Shadow Government Stats, the unemployment rate would be about 22% if it included all the categories which have been excluded to puff the number..
We could probably make the number worse yet, say if we count everyone of working age, without a full-time job, as unemployed, regardless of any other attributes.
Sarcasm aside, if we put the number somewhere between the CBO estimate and ShadowStats, we are still in the high teens.
And people like you would still try to white wash or ignore it. I don't understand it, what's wrong with the truth?
Nothing is wrong with the truth. Everyone knows we're in a hole. Some of us are trying to climb out of it. Others, like yourself, are still at the bottom wringing their hands.
New data? How very strange? The CBO report states that their data on unemployment and the unemployed comes from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which the BLS has been conducting every month since 1940. The U6 number has been above 15% every month since Jan 2009 and it's rather surprising that anyone can classify this as "new". The BLS has been releasing this eye-opening, super secret data monthly, since, oh I don't know, 2002. You can find it here: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab15.htm Someone as concerned with the state of the US economy and the labor mkt as you appear to be should have known all this stuff already.