Today is my favorite time of the month. Today is August 7 and  it’s the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts out who got fired aka the employment situation, economic news release. This is where all of the media gets the numbers that they spin. Why don’t they just provide the numbers with no commentary? I guess that would be boring. Here is my entertaining spin on the pieces of clouds that are hitting me on the head.
Nonfarm payroll employment declined by 247,000 jobs (we needed 100,000 jobs a month to continue to employ the job market BEFORE La Crisis, so don’t let the corporate people lie to you and let you think everything is ok now since last month it was higher, it’s not ok, it’s nowhere near ok.)
“Another way of looking at the above task is to determine how long it will take the nation to return to full employment — basically an economy in which everyone who wants to work can find a full-time job to match their skill set and experience. It’s no minor task: the U.S. economy has to create about 200,000 jobs per month — a roughly net 100,000 job gain over the monthly gain needed to keep unemployment from rising — for the next 5.5 years to replace the roughly 6.8 million jobs lost during the recession.” Joseph Lazzaro, Daily Finance.
Also there are now 796,000 discouraged workers up by 335,000 over the past 12 months.
And there are now five million people who have been unemployed longterm (longterm is more than 27 weeks.)
On Chart A12 section U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached   workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.. is now 16.3%.
The Employment Situation for August is scheduled to be released on Friday,
September 4, 2009, at 8:30 a.m. (EDT).
–Edited by Browne Molyneux
I recently picked the latest issue of The Happy Times, a newspaper that purports to only cover the good things in life, and I’m pretty sure this sort of story would not make the cut, being all real and all. Instead, they have a story about Shelby the light bulb. I kid you not.
Me? I like a dose of reality.
Thanks again, Browne. There’s probably more information about the REAL current economy in your article than there is in any major newspaper today, including the WSJ. I think the elephant in the room is a lack of a real American export. We have to invest in green. We do that while regulating the market more strictly than we had in previous years, and we could really bounce back. With the current government in Washington, the opportunity is there for unions to establish themselves as part of the foundation of this green movement, too. We basically need to make it Reagan-Bush proof. The town hall mobs of whiners and nut jobs can call it socialism all they want, but we also have to build a US ran company in these industries to prevent Wall Street from breaking the industry up and selling the labor off shores, as they did with the tech industry.
this is worth looking at. mainly for the chart at the top. really makes it look like everything has gotten so much “better.”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/08/unemployment_falls_by_1_percen.html