The Sky Is Falling
Or maybe not: 112,000 new jobs added to the economy, and the unemployment rate is down to 5.6 % - lowest in over two years.
[wik] A later version of the AP story adds this tidbit:
Some economists think hiring really is occurring in the economy, but it is not being reflected in the Labor Department's monthly survey of business payrolls. In the separate survey of households, employment jumped by 496,000 last month.
The household survey counts self-employed workers and contract workers, which are increasing. The survey of businesses does not.
Posted by
Buckethead
on
| § 6
on
| § 6
§ 6 Comments
[ You're too late, comments are closed ]
Not to rain on your parade,
Not to rain on your parade, but the economy needs to add over twice that many each month just to keep up with population growth. So that number represents falling behind.
Second, the unemployment rate does not include people who have "stopped looking for work". The employment to population ratio is the one we really need to be concerned with. I'll see if I can find a source.
You might find this
You might find this informative:
[url=http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2004/01/augmented_unemp.html]htt…]
The unemployment rate also
The unemployment rate also under-represents small business employment, and doesn't count the self employed. That's probably a wash with your qualifiers.
Also, just to say this for the umptieighth time, the economy is improving - but we're coming out of a recession. Things are better, but it will be a little while before things are totally peachy. Which will happen. The sky isn't falling.
It may have already fallen.
It may have already fallen. ;)
Does the disparity between the administration's predictions and reality bother you at all? Presumably, before each of the last three budgets, they knew that we were in a recession, or coming out of one.
How did the budgets end up so wrong?
Here are the raw employment numbers:
[url=http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf]http://stats.bls.gov/n…]
I take all economic
I take all economic predictions with a big lump of salt. Wall Street experts, academic economists, financial journalists, and the government all make predictions, all of which are wrong in their particulars, and sometimes altogether wrong.
I'm reminded of the famous
I'm reminded of the famous Mark Twain quote - "There are three kinds of lies in this world: lies, damned lies, and statistics."