Unemployment Goes Down ! For who?

Hey good news folks, it looks like the unemployment numbers went down.  Wait, you didn't get the memo? Yeah, me neither. I guess the power brokers wanted to keep the stock market on life support for a couple of weeks longer. 

It sure was tough to spin this one away.

Watch the Spin

The economy has lost 4.0 million jobs over the last year and 8.42 million jobs since the recession began. Jobs peaked in December of 2007 and this  "Great Recession" is giving employers no signal to start warming up the assembly lines in the near future. 

    From all accounts it looks like we are in it for the long haul. This is the longest amount of time that the economy has suffered since having peak employment post WWII.

Truth is, that if we want to find a real unemployment number we have to find it for ourselves. Why would our government or our media want to provide us with such an accurate picture of a flailing economy? News outlets hardly ever refer to U-6 statistics.  And if they do, they quickly reference to the number then find a way to segue to the latest celebrity calamity or the local weather.  The U-6 is the most important statistical unemployment data because it measures discouraged job seekers, people who have fallen off of unemployment benefits and people who would want to work full time but have had to settle for part time positions. 

This should be the official unemployment bell weather. It reflects the way our society functions in a global competitive market and how modern families have adjusted to this model. The fact that this percentage of the unemployed  is being found but not used as the real indicator accounts for the Department of Labor being out of touch with Main Street or being used as a pawn in the political football game that is Washington D.C. There should be a strong push to update how the Department of Labor articulates its estimations. 

This month the U-6 number was at 16.5%.  There is a record 6.31 million Americans that have not been working for 26 weeks or more.

                                To put this in perspective, the unemployed could over populate every metropolitan city in the United States except for New York City. However, with good faith in a crappy economy, I am sure in the next two months NYC can be taken over by the jobless as well.

It is time to take some of the 6 million unemployed to Washington, maybe then the Department of Labor can get a better count of who is still looking for work and who has given up.