Unemployment in America

[chegitz guevara]

On Wednesday, after a month of dicking around, the Senate finally passed an extension for unemployment. It provides an additional fourteen weeks of unemployment, with six more weeks for those in states with unemployment rates of over 9.5% (like my state). So, in the worst hit states, like Michigan, California, Florida, Oregon, etc., there is now a maximum of 99 weeks of unemployment "benefits."

In the month that the Senate has been playing games with this bill, two hundred thousand people have lost their benefits.

The House passed a similar bill to the Senate's on Thursday. Obama signed the bill on Friday.

So all's hunky dory, right? No. In the states that have commented so far, Florida (and Washington, iirc), it will take four to six weeks! to start getting unemployment checks to those whose benefits have expired. So not only did we have to wait a month for the politicians, now we have to wait at least another month for the bureaucrats! AND, the bill did not contain language to make the payments retroactive. So if you haven't been getting unemployment for a month or so, you're not gonna be getting a fat check to help you catch up on your bills. (And this personally affects me, as my wife's benefits ran out in September, and we are now a month behind on rent--I will finish paying off October's rent on Monday).

As for unemployment,

The "official" unemployment rate in the United States is 10.2%. That is the government's U-3 rate, which includes those collecting benefits who have looked for work (by any means) in the last four weeks.

The government also publishes a U-6 rate (in fact, rates U-1 through U-6). U-6 is what we lefties consider the true unemployment rate. This includes workers who've run out their benefits (but are still looking for work), marginally attached workers (the underemployed and looking for full time work), and discouraged workers (those who've given up). The national U-6 was 17.5% in October. More than one sixth of the labor pool cannot find adequate work. This rate is still slightly less than the 1983 recession (though that was much shorter in duration--also, U-6 was calculated differently in '83, the current rate would be 14% using the old calculation).

Individual states have different rates. The latest data for the states is from September. The state with the least unemployment is North Dakota, with a U-3 rate of 4.2% :drool: Michigan has a U-3 of 15.3%, it's the worst hit in the country. Florida is at 11%.

The Feds do not publish U-6 rates on a monthly bases for the individual states (they do it quarterly). To find the true unemployment rate you have to do a bit of math, and the math is based on a guess. So, you take take U-6/U-3 national rate and multiply it by the U-3 of the state. That gives us an approximate U-6 for Michigan of over 26%, California 21%, Florida, 19%.

It's going to get worse.

[Monkey Riding Dragon]

I recently made a post on this subject on another message board. I too mentioned the statistics and provided a somewhat broader commentary on the U.S. economic situation. Since I think it's relevant here, I'll go ahead and reprint it:


According to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics yesterday, October was the most catastrophic month American working people have seen since May (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8346936.stm). The October jobs report, like the May jobs report, highlights the important distinction between two different standards of measuring job losses. The most common one we hear about is the measure based on a survey of employers. In October, this figure showed that another 190,000 jobs had been lost. While that's very bad in its own right, the household survey that's used to measure the unemployment rate more accurately reflects the material truth for two reasons: 1) it includes the self-employed, and 2) it uses a better measure of small businesses. In short, it's more thorough. This latter figure revealed that fully 558,000 jobs were eliminated in the month of October. The result? The official jobless rate rose from 9.8 percent in September to 10.2 percent in October.

I saw a report yesterday on...I think it was CNN (either that or MSNBC) that actually attributed the enormous 0.4 percent rise in the official unemployment rate to discouraged workers re-entering the workforce. Bullsh*t! The BLS report also revealed that the broader U-6 measure of unemployment (that is, the real unemployment rate...or something vaguely resembling it anyway) rose even more sharply: by fully a half percentage point to a new record high of 17.5 percent!

Obama responded to this (as he put it) "sobering" (I would say damning) news by announcing that he "will not rest until all Americans who want work can find work". The president's commitment to crafting a full-employment economy was immediately exposed as utterly farcical, as he went on to announce his plans to address the jobs crisis: He will extend existing tax breaks and the length of unemployment benefits. As to his plans to actually, you know, create jobs, no measures were mentioned. He likewise boasted that his stimulus package had "saved or created 1 million jobs". Even if we actually fail to question this figure (and we should question it (http://www.axisofjustice.org/most-popular/obamas-economic-recovery-plan-the-real-number-fewer-than-1000.html)) and simply take Obama's word for it, I think we can pretty clearly see that even 1 million jobs "saved or created" doesn't exactly rival the 8.2 million jobs that have been lost since the start of the recession. In reality, the stimulus package was fundamentally aimed at forking over unlimited sums of federal money to Wall Street to restore its short-term profitability and long-term confidence (a key factor in stock market bubble growth). It has been estimated that, over the course of the coming decades, the measures therein will deliver more than $10 trillion (and possibly more than $20 trillion) to the financial aristocracy in various forms.

The truth is that, for Obama and the corporate and financial giants that he represents, high unemployment is not unwanted. It is, rather, absolutely necessary: a key to restoring economic growth. Demagogy, however, helps to placate the masses.

...

On January 11th of this year (a time when the official jobless rate stood at 7.2 percent), I predicted [on this other message board] that the (official) unemployment rate would reach somewhere in the range of 10.5 to 11 percent by year's end. (I later extended the upper limit of that forecast range to 11.5 percent.) Already this dire prediction has proven closer to the truth than most of the government's forecasts (8 percent, 9 percent, 9.8 percent...) With two months remaining in the year and a current (again, official) rate of 10.2 percent, we are on track to fulfill that nightmarish vision.
In original context. (http://forums.matrixfans.net/showthread.php?p=511834#post511834)

[chegitz guevara]

Thank you for posting this, Comrade.

[chegitz guevara]

Interesting information here: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/11/employment-population-ratio-record-part.html

[Jimmie Higgins]

God information. I'd like see what rates are for different groups like the young and ex-felons regionally and across the country. Unemployment is always higher among young people and people of color and, in the past, economic problems hit the young and oppressed groups the hardest.

[chegitz guevara]

The government provides a lot of this data for free. You can find it at: http://www.bls.gov/bls/unemployment.htm