Thursday, July 22, 2010

Most Terrifying Unemployment Graph?

Via The Atlantic.  Someone at the Department of Labor is probably going to have a stern talking-to over this.  Why?  Because it exposes the ongoing lie in the published unemployment percentages.  The Bureau of Labor has been publishing unemployment percentages this year that range from almost 11% to just over 9% – but the only reason those numbers are so low is because the Bureau rather arbitrarily removes millions of people from the unemployed category by saying that they've given up looking for work (and somehow, magically, that means they're no longer unemployed – only a bureaucrat could think that made sense!).  How do people get classified as having given up?  The biggest factor: how long they've been unemployed!

The real unemployment number is somewhere around 15% to 18% (the Bureau doesn't release enough data to compute it precisely, or at least I couldn't find that data).  There are a lot of people who have been out of work for over six months now...

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