Unemployment Discussion

[banca rotta]

Harry Reid: Only 36,000 Lost Their Jobs Today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC211h9AY-4

I guess this is good news for Him. Can you imagine someone saying this outloud in public?

Sadly so many voted for this idiot and so many probably still support him.

[WhatMoney]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC211h9AY-4
I guess this is good news for Him. Can you imagine someone saying this outloud in public?

Sadly so many voted for this idiot and so many probably still support him.

Only Nevadans voted for Reid. He of course meant it was "good" relative to the expectations of job loss for February, which ran as high 120,000. Lower is good. Now don't you feel better?

Nonfarm payrolls fell by 36,000 in February after declining by 26,000 in January.
The consensus expected payrolls to decline by 68,000.
The unemployment rate held at 9.7% in February.
The consensus expected it to increase to 9.8%.

Key Factors
It seems forecasters, including us (Briefing estimated 120,000), overestimated the effects of the severe winter weather on the payrolls data. The consensus estimate included a decline of 100,000 in payrolls due to inclement weather. As the BLS stated in its press release, the estimate turned out to be bogus and weather conditions played almost no role in moving the payroll numbers.

Importantly, the unemployment rate did not hold at 9.7% due to statistical manipulations. Instead, the data provide evidence of an influx in job creation. The number of employed increased by 308,000 while the labor force rose by 342,000.

There is a strong caveat to the unemployment data. The increase in employment is not coming from full-time/high-wage positions. Employment growth was caused by workers taking part-time jobs because poor business conditions made it difficult to find full-time work. These new part-time hires topped the entire aggregate increase in employment, 312,000 to 308,000.

From Briefing.com A very conservative financial source.

[WhatMoney]

The You-tube video is a "good" example of how the right wing press distorts what public figures say and the naive public believe this political propaganda.

This 8 second You-tube video was edited to remove what Reid was actually saying was good. But why should the American people expect accuracy from the Glen Beck show and the right wing media?

Audio Beck played cropped and distorted Reid's comments. The audio Beck played appears to be from a seven-second YouTube video promoted by Andrew Breitbart and right-wing bloggers, which includes only the following portion of Reid's statement: "[T]oday is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." The video cuts out Reid's explanation that the "good" news is that unemployment and job losses were lower than expected.

http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/201003050033

Glenn Beck played doctored audio of Sen. Harry Reid saying it is "good" news that the economy lost only 36,000 jobs in February -- an assessment many economists agree with. Beck criticized Reid's statement, but Beck's audio cut out Reid's accurate explanation that the "good" news was that unemployment and job losses were lower than economists had expected.

[banca rotta]

Actually I don't feel better. The reason I don't feel better is because all these stats are lies for one thing and guys like Reid are prolonging the pain with their "jobs programs" among other things.

To steal a qoute for Ronald Reagan and change it to fit the times,

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Obama, Reid, Pelosi lose theirs."

[WhatMoney]

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Obama, Reid, Pelosi lose theirs."

And another quote: "When Republicans are out of power they do everything they can to blame and attack the government. When Republicans are in power, they then proceed to destroy the government."

Actually I am looking forward to the Republican control of the Congress again, and the replacement of Obama with a Republican conservative. If you think things are bad now, just wait until the Repugs get back in control. Best way to assure the USA becomes a 3rd world country - turn control back to the same ones that created the hole we are trying to climb out of now.

[Pizza]

It's the Information Age, isn't it? Or should we say, the Offshoring Age? 'Full' employment is history.

[banca rotta]

And another quote: "When Republicans are out of power they do everything they can to blame and attack the government. When Republicans are in power, they then proceed to destroy the government."

Actually I am looking forward to the Republican control of the Congress again, and the replacement of Obama with a Republican conservative. If you think things are bad now, just wait until the Repugs get back in control. Best way to assure the USA becomes a 3rd world country - turn control back to the same ones that created the hole we are trying to climb out of now.

Well both republicans and dems blame and attack each other, but then do the sames exact things once elected. Still wonder why there are so many of you that actually trust your political party after all this.

Wall Street is who's destroying the govt. The dems and repubs are destroying the USA.

There is no "climbing out of this hole". It's like quick sand where you sink no matter what you do, no matter which way you move.

A third party could prove me wrong.

[junker]

In ANY other time in our history Obama would not have even had a slim chance of victory....its just that Bush finally disgusted Americans sooo much ..and we saw McCain and Sara as a continuation of his policies..that people just picked what they thought was the LESSER of the evils...basically there was NO choice....now they are seeing that maybe he wasnt the LESS of the evils....extreme liberal left...or radical right...big choice.....

[Pizza]

Unemployment is high because people aren't spending, and people aren't spending because unemployment is high... hmm...

[banca rotta]

In ANY other time in our history Obama would not have even had a slim chance of victory....its just that Bush finally disgusted Americans sooo much ..and we saw McCain and Sara as a continuation of his policies..that people just picked what they thought was the LESSER of the evils...basically there was NO choice....now they are seeing that maybe he wasnt the LESS of the evils....extreme liberal left...or radical right...big choice.....

I agree.

I felt for years that fiscal and monetary collapse is unavoidable and between McCain's bad policies plus the fact he ran such an awful campaign, the republicans let Obama have the job so he's standing there looking dumb and will be remembered for decades to come as being the president that over saw the US's crash.

Some love to blame him, Bush, etc. but the one thing I won't blame Obama for is our system has been flawed for too long, though he doesnt have the courage nor leadership to fix it, only make it worse.

We have all known for decades that our national debt combined with unfunded liabilites will sooner or later catch up and Obama's stuck with this mess.

I mean think about this. The crash of 2008 that started in 2007 snowballed only weeks before the election. Someone upstairs wanted Obama in at this time so when the bigger crash comes he will be a deer in the head lights.

[Xue]

21 per cent unemployment?

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week's first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times.

--Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03242010.html

I agree with the following:

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today, Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy theorist."

[banca rotta]

It looks like the March jobs numbers turned for the better today. Of course we can only hope it's sustainable and not BS jobs, but it's so hard to trust the BLS.

I know 48k that were created are temp, census jobs.

[DeadManCrawling]

U-6, the measure of unemployed AND underemployed, paints a very much bleaker picture, and stands at 17.8%.

Some of the ways BLS can "fudge" the numbers are pretty slick, too. The birth/death adjustment, for instance. They gauge how many jobs are created, supposedly automatically, by our expanding population. But the actual numbers are calculated by another department, and no one will say exactly what methodology was employed.

Take that away, along with the census hiring, and we actually creep into negative numbers for Q1 2010.

So, which are the correct numbers?

I doubt anyone really knows. Smoke and mirrors, and I will continue to believe what I see with my eyes and hear from other folks around the country. It is still very bad.

I wish there was a way to poke through the illusion and see the truth, stark and naked, free of "adjustments" and "ideology".

[WhatMoney]

U-6 not seasonally adjusted is 17.5%, down from 17.9% in February.
U-6 seasonally adjusted is 16.9%, up from 16.8% in February.



Useful links for anyone wanting a detailed employment picture, as opposed to personal opinion:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.b.htm

[DeadManCrawling]

Good links.

As good of a place to start as any. The problem is HOW these things are adjusted and what methodology is behind the whole picture. Over the years, those methodologies have been changed, so measuring against previous recessions and depressions is fairly difficult for most people.

When a census worker, who worked one hour in a 12 day period, is counted as "employed", I think we are really stretching the bounds of common sense. Especially given the temporary nature of census jobs. I have seen quite a few new stories on this jobs release today, and they seem filled with unbridled optimism, that we have now turned one of the last corners and are about to vault back to the stratosphere, with new jobs aplenty.

But when you start looking a little deeper, it seems this job report has raised more questions than it answered. I would love to be more positive, but cannot. My income would benefit greatly from an economy in recovery, but I cannot be confident we are even at the bottom yet.