← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kathaksung
Thread ID: 7081 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-06-02
2003-06-02 22:13 | User Profile
When the government need a war, they censored the information of anti-war movement. And let media give out a poll that most people support war or Bush got a high approve rate. So let most Americans thought they were the minority. Because Bush is their favourite, they cheat in everyway to keep him in President's post. From poll to unemployment rate. Think on opposite, or discount their forgery at 50%. Here is how they cheat people on unemployment rate. Do you think at this moment, when high tech. industry in a severe downturn, and air line, hotel, travel business damaged hevily by SARS. It's still 6%? Double it to 11.9%.
Quote, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS DISCOVERED THAT OFFICIAL U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT DATA HIDE REAL UNEMPLOYMENT.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their payroll jobs during the last few months, but the official U.S. unemployment barely rose from 5.7% to 5.8% between January and March. Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes that this is impossible, and is becoming a scandal.
Today's issue states that, "with all that is going wrong in the U.S. economy, economists are starting to suspect that the current unemployment rate of 5.8% ... could be underestimating the true level of distress in the labor market." The Journal reports some ways by which the Labor Department Bureau of Labor Statistics "misses" the real number of unemployed. "Many laid-off workers ... are simply setting themselves up as independent consultants operating from their home offices." They are self-employed.
Many of these "self-employed" consultants may work only one-third as many hours as they did when they had a job--or have no clients and thus have no work at all--but they are still counted by the BLS as employed.
The Journal states that others, after months of futilely searching for jobs may have become "too discouraged to look for work"--indeed, this category has risen by 360,000 workers during the past year.
But the BLS has made "too discouraged to look for work" as a category within "Not In the Labor Force"; however, in order to be counted as unemployed, a worker must be classified as "In the Labor Force."
Thus, the "too discouraged" are not considered as unemployed.
Further, the Journal states, "some are simply opting to take what they can get, working part-time at low-wage jobs that provide some health benefits."
These workers are "Part-Time for Economic Reasons." The number of such workers has increased by 500,000 during the past year.
{EIR} has determined a real unemployment level: - Table 1 - EIR's Level of Real Unemployment, March 2003 Official Unemployment 8.45 million "Want a Job Now" 4.76 million "Part-Time for Economic Reasons 4.70 million
Total Unemployment 17.91 million Unemployment Rate 11.9%
Of the 8.45 million whom the BLS reports as being officially unemployed, 1.90 million, or 22%, have been unemployed for more than six months.
2003-06-02 23:40 | User Profile
One major way the Government keeps the unemployment rate down is they keep changing the conventions they used. If we used the same conventions used in the 50's, the rate would be far higher.