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Gary Edwards

Abbott and Costello explain "unemployment." | The Rugged Individualist - 1 views

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    The rugged individual has a new post where he re scripts the famous Abbott - Costello "Whose On First?" routine.  This time with Obamanomics double speak.  Great explanation of the Obama difference between being "unemployed" and "out of work".  It's the difference between 8.1% unemployed and 16% "out of work". excerpt" "This past month the country added only 96,000 jobs but the unemployment rate dropped two tenths of a point (8.3% to 8.1%). How was that possible? Well, just listen to Abbott. A 0.2% decrease in the unemployment rate is, in fact, a rather hefty decrease. To accomplish that should have required closer to 250-300,000 new jobs (and that doesn't count that the population grew by 213,000 people). The computation that the public is fed, the unemployment rate, is the number that makes headlines. The reason the rate fell so dramatically is because 437,000 people gave up on looking for work. There are now 7.0 million people that have dropped out of the workforce, or 2.9% of the population, the highest of the Great Recession. Thus, the declines were largely the function of labor force withdrawal. Data confirm this suspicion: 195,000 went from employed to not in labor force, and 226,000 from unemployed to not in labor force, both very large numbers by historical standards. We are down 4.7 million jobs from the pre-recession peak. At less than 100,000 jobs added per month, it would take four more years just to get back to where we were five years ago. Which would not appreciably reduce the unemployment rate, due to the growth in population. Possibly even worse still is that in 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. It is now about one for every 16 workers. As of April we have added 5.4 million people to the disability rolls since the beginning of 2009. This is several million above the previous trend. There are now almost 9 million on disability. If disability had stayed at the pre-recession growth trend, unemployment would be at le
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