One year ago this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner wrote "Welcome to the Recovery" in the NYTimes. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/opinion/03geithner.html What a joke. Layoffs are at a 16-month high. Unemployment is up in every major U.S. city. . . Borders just laid off 10,700 people Goldman Sachs laid off 1,000 Cisco cut 6,500 Lockheed Martin fired 3,300 Merck slashed 13,000 Research in Motion slashed 3,000 HSBC cut 25,000 Boston Scientific cut 1,400 Pfizer chopped 5,530 But hey, "Welcome to the Recovery!" (And people thought "Mission Accomplished" was a dumb statement . . . )
more spin, figuring out the unemployment rate is a flawed equation. For instance if you no longer are eligable for benifits because you have been out of work for to long, then you dont collect benifits and are not counted in the unemployment rate but you are still unemployed.
...default is inevitable [money is created out of debt and there will NEVER be enough to pay it off], things are only going to get worse...most intelligent minds have known this for years!
I'm not the one mentioning unemployment rate just commenting that it is not worse than last year (as implied) If it is a flawed equation, why does it get referred to by both political parites when discussing the economy? In fact Republicans seem to use it more to prove their points, is this just more spin by republican using a flawed equation?
I don't think so. It's 24.9%. That's higher then during the Great Depression. The rate you see is for people receiving unemployment. If you add to it those who do not qualify, have run out of benefits or are working part time at menial jobs with college degrees (called underemployed) the rate is huge. People simply do not understand how bad things are.
The private sector is saving up all its cash to save us! It's just waiting for Commissioner Gordon to flash the bat-signal, then the hiring will begin! barfo
OK given your definition of unemployment, what was it last year and this year? The more we play with the definitio,n I think we could have some fun with this. Like let's include all people who think they are underemployed and see what that makes the rate. How about all people who are underpaid? People with college degree who don't have fulltime jobs? People who don't work 60 hours a week? We can get this thing up to 99% if we are cretive enough with the definition.
Unemployment is figured by a survey of 60,000 households. The margin of error is really small. Jobless claims is a much smaller number - like 1.6M per month.
Goldman Sachs and HSBC are criminal organizations instrumental in the theft of millions of homes from Americans, and need to be shut down entirely. Borders has never been more than a Barnes & Noble wannabee with no creativity of it's own. Lockheed Martin does this every 5 years or so. Merck and Pfizer are financially dependent on people having health insurance so their collapse is inevitable. Research in Motion makes Blackberry's and not much else. Their market is saturated already. Boston Scientific boosted their second quarter profits 49% and are merely trimming a bit of fat (6% of their workforce). Cisco's cuts resulted from sales of parts of it's organization in a complete re-assessment of it's bloated and far-flung holdings. None of these cuts had much to do with anything political, nor are they large or unusual cuts for such huge companies. Just business as usual. I might also add none of these companies is of much importance to America, and nobody would miss them if they folded tomorrow morning.
Bush's Treasury guy would have been forced out long ago by the media. This article is a weapon against Obama in 2012, though, so that's a plus.
Here's a good look at "real unemployment" rates other the last two decades: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
