I posted this in a response to Sandra who comments here quite often. I think it is important enough to give it its own space. The following was taken from an article written by John Lott, Fox News.com, link follows below.
Guess What?? Unemployment’s Really at 16.3%
The announcement today that the unemployment rate declined slightly to 9.4 percent in July while only 247,000 additional jobs were lost has been greeted as good news. The change in the unemployment rate puts the rate at what it was in May. Yet, even a rough look at the numbers indicates that the true unemployment rate has been getting significantly worse over the last few months.
How is it possible for the unemployment rate to essentially remain unchanged when 247,000 jobs have been lost? The reason is simple — the number of people who stopped looking for work rose dramatically. Six hundred thirty-seven thousand additional people no longer consider themselves looking for work. This is by far the largest drop in the number of people who consider themselves in the labor force during the last year. — It is almost twice the 358,000 increase in the people who left the labor force during June and almost four times the average monthly increase of 167,333 over the last year. Jobs are sufficiently scarce and the prospects of people finding them at wages that they are willing to work for so low that many individuals don’t think that it is worth their time to even look for a job.
These discouraged workers will again look for work once the economy starts to improve, but this 6.9 percentage point gap between publicly discussed unemployment rate and these discouraged workers is unusually large. (emphasis mine)
Read Article from Fox News Here
Just a side note by me, but what do you think will happen to the unemployment rating when health care is completely taken over and run by the government? What about all those private insurance carrier jobs? I’m not talking about the rich people at the top, I am taking about regular working 9-5 types like you and me. Think about it.
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