The latest report is in and despite the claim of a 7.8% rate when examined in minor detail it is still poor. Let us examine in a bit of detail:
First as above we see that the unemployment based upon the Jan 2008 percent of population employed is still just under 12%. In fact is has frozen there. Remember that more than 47% of the population was employed then and that the population increases at 250,000 or more a month so that we need about 120,000 plus new jobs a month just to stand still. That is the issue of having a moving denominator, one can come up with whatever number one wants.
What is critical in the above is that we are stalled at about 42% of the population employed whereas before the crash we had 45% of the population employed. Thus we have about 12 million lost from the employment pool, just written off, the "Forgotten Workers". The 7.8% is thus frankly an arithmetic fluke, an insult to those written out of the pages of the employable. I would never expect the Press to even understand this no less report on it, it is against their core and is not within their limited intellect.
The above shows the details of what I have said above especially the growing population but the lagging employment. In fact September was downward sloping. The Devil is always in the details.
The above gives further insight showing what we have discussed.
The red line shows whether we are gaining or losing. Here we show just about zero gain at best. Not what the DOL suggests.
Now my favorite. This is the Romer chart. She said we would be a booming economy by now. So much for left wing economists. Please don't have them build bridges.
The above is the error rate on Romer and below we show the percent error.
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