Monday, February 14, 2011

The Unemployed: Believe Me or Your Lying Eyes!

My favorite New Jersey economist has a posting regarding unemployment and he states that there really is no structural change, namely it is uniform. He states:

....that unemployment is about shifting workers out of construction. As Larry points out, the BLS provides data on the previous employment of the unemployed. There were 7.7 million more unemployed workers in 2010 than there were in 2007; of those extra 7.7 million, only 1.1 million had previously been employed in construction.

However as we have been showing for the past two years, using 2005 as a baseline we see a major shift in employment from manufacturing and construction and the private sector in general to government supported and government only employment.  Just look at our monthly analyses for the past two years plus. The issue is employment not unemployment.

Oh well, I am just an engineer by training, I get so messed up with facts!