A Little Common Sense Redux

Mental Aikido: A Little Common Sense: The latest numbers are out. The unemployment rate has dropped to 8.6%, the lowest it has been in over two years. That sounds like great news...

I wrote the article back in December of 2011.

It's early April. The "new numbers" are out. By the U3 calculations, the unemployment is now at 8.2%, a three year low. That's great news, isn't it?

Well, if you read the earlier article and understand the math and process, it may not be.

Among the numbers revealed, "experts" were expecting 200,000 new jobs. There were only 120,000. That 80k deficit in jobs created should already raise a few eyebrows.

Other considerations are that more people left the workforce than found jobs. Yes, another month with that same trend. An estimated 310,000 people left the workforce in the past month, bringing the number of adult Americans not counted in the labor force to a record high 87,897,000.

 Layoff percentages have, indeed, declined. Fewer jobs are being cancelled than being created, but not enough.

Yahoo is laying off a large number of people.

Best Buy has announced it is closing some stores, laying off more people.

Liberals are boycotting Walmart, our Nation's largest private employer. If effective, such a boycott could lead to even more jobs lost as well as reductions in pay for those in hourly and entry-level positions. Then again, the idea is to get more people enslaved to government handouts.


New business start-ups are still at an all-time low. Increased invasive regulations are making it even harder to start a business.

The U3 numbers do not include those who have taken part-time jobs in order to mitigate the reduced income of a layoff. They are"under-employed". Many of them made "too much" at their previous jobs to qualify for unemployment.

The U3 numbers also don't include those who have given up.

The U3 numbers take those whose unemployment handouts have run out.

The U3 takes, from the workforce base number, those who claimed disability to augment or replace unemployment handouts.

The U3 numbers do not include military retirees. They do not include veterans that were medically separated with more than a 50% disability rating. This is despite that both categories contain individuals seeking employment, and capable of being employed.

The U3 numbers do not include former stay-at-home parents who are trying to re-enter the workforce. (They are not eligible for unemployment payouts). In fact, there are now more women on government subsidies (TANF, EBT, etc) than there were in 2008, and a far greater percentage than men. 

The real unemployment figure is closer to 10.9%, not counting the underemployed.

Veteran Unemployment is still one of the highest demographics, and it is not getting any better. This at a time when Barry-O has called for a reduction of the force. 

The White House Propagandists, Media Matters for America, Think Progress, Ditzy Debbie Hand-puppet (Wasserman-Schultz) and her husband at MSDNC (NBC), a lackey for MMfA, want you to believe their tripe-wash. They don't want you to do the math yourself. Now, Debbie has long ago proven that she failed pre-algebra and never took another math class. If she has, her numbers would be more accurate. However, she will quote made-up numbers to tell you things have gotten better under her lord and master.

If the market were allowed, without government intervention, adjust itself to the normal cyclical trends, the recession would have ended sooner and this "recovery" would have long been over. We should be much further on the rise, looking at another bull market. We aren't.

I'm not an expert. However, I will take the analysis of people like Art Laffer, Steven Moore, and Peter Schiff long before I'll take Ditzy Debbie's or Barack Obama's word for it. Heck, Barry-O cannot even get the US Constitution correct. That's his alleged field of expertise. Why would I trust him and his cronies on the topic of Economics? I don't.

Wake-Up! Question the statistics coming from the government and the liberals' Mainstream Media propagandists.