Oops. Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart exposed the Nekkid Emperor and admitted that the economy is in worse shape than reported. Smart money sez to look soon for Lockhart to announce his retirement for “personal reason.”
Before the Clinton administration, labor statistics took into account those who have given up looking for work and those who are working less than they want to. The federal government revised the classifications in 1994.
For example, the official unemployment statistics exclude those who have actively looked for work in the past 12 months but have given up and not looked for work in the past 4 weeks. It also does not include people who were downsized into lower-paying or part-time jobs.
Though the data is published every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mainstream media have ignored this information during the Obama administration. Instead, they report on “little green shoot,” rainbows, unicorns, and the state of Obama’s transfiguration. information that is inconvenient to the Messiah is dutifully ignored.
The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.
“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.
He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.
Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.
Your homework tonight is to compare and contrast how the media reported on unemployment during the Bush era and how they report it in the Obama era.
- Bush’s Economy: Unemployment soars (July 3, 2003 by AP)
- Surprisingly strong economic data signal turning point (August 7, 2009 by AP)
