The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

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The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Feb 11, 2009 2:53 pm

The Real Jobless Rate Is 18 Percent

By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch. Posted February 11, 2009.

snip

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed, because some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs, and it shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two-month count of Americans who lost jobs at 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the U.S. media is a fabrication. Williams reports that in changes since 1980, particularly in the Clinton era,

" 'Discouraged workers' -- those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had -- were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been 'discouraged' for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18 percent in January, from 17.5 percent in December."

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data, the U.S. unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

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http://www.alternet.org/workplace/12631 ... 8_percent/
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