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Memories of the 28th Century

Disappointment

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I started writing a blog post about unemployment, and that the stated figures are not in agreement with the greater unemployment that I see, so I looked at the available statistics, and I was shocked. The information that the BLS puts out are incomplete, and there are no tables of the missing numbers. That creates the appearance that the numbers were dreamed up. That was a disappointment. I was looking forward to ranting for six hundred words, but I can’t.

This started last week, when I noticed that the feds just declared that the unemployment rate is now 6.6%, and I wondered how they are defining unemployment these days. When I last looked into the matter people were defined as unemployed if they were not employed and were actively looking for employment. The matter of actively seeking employment was a catch, because some people are actively seeking employment, but they aren’t putting enough time into it to please the feds. If one looks at total employment as a fraction of total population, I wonder what the historical numbers have been. I hypothesize that the employment number has been sliding for the last forty years, but it plummeted since 2005. I’ll look up the answer later.

Unfortunately, the website that has the numbers was poorly designed, so it is impossible to determine anything, except what the Bureau of Labor of Statistics wants you to see. For some reason the statistics exclude roughly 70,000,000. This table claims to be employment of the civilian population, but there aren’t seventy million in the military, so why are they being ignored? If they had a number for the non-civilians and numbers for others excluded, then the table would give the appearance of being accurate, and I wouldn’t have had any complaint, but they don’t even know to fudge the figures. The link is below, so take a look.

I wish that I could say that if I didn’t know better, then I would think that the BLS is hiding data. But I don’t know that they aren’t. If I were designing tables for total unemployment, then I would include references to the numbers excluded with the numbers and the source of those numbers. It looks like someone decided what the total employment and percent of people in the workforce were just dreamed up, and the numbers don’t add up to a meaningful total. I will confess that I am not an expert in labor statistics, but I am intelligent, and I can work with numbers, so I want the rest of the numbers.

Even without the proper lead in, I still think that the country would be better off with fewer regulations limiting the ability of people to start new businesses. Regulations plus tax laws that make it easy to ship jobs to other countries are the primary reasons why so many people are unemployed, and failure to pay people in this country is steadily eroding the customer bases of most businesses – If people can’t get incomes, then how can they spend their incomes?






Table A-1. Employment status of the civilian population by sex and age
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

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