Well, here’s the latest propaganda from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Glance over it and then break out your calculator.
I promise to keep it nice and easy as we go through this step by step. Do you remember May of 2008, when the D’s were getting all het up about a 5.5% unemployment rate? Well, just in case you have forgotten, here’s the BLS chart of unemployment since 1998.
Now, last May the Demos were all het up about a 5.5% unemployment rate. Bush was killing the economy, and YouTube has a lot of clips of Demos foaming at the mouth about the situation.
Now, here is where you can either follow along or trust my calculator.
According to WikiAnswers there were 150,800,000 Americans with jobs at the end of 2006, when the unemployment rate was 4.4%.
104.4 X 150,600,000 = 157,226,400 people were either working or looking for work. Let’s call that 157,225,000, close enough.
Conventional wisdom has it that the American economy must create 150,000 jobs a month to stay even. December 2006 to now is 24 months.
24 X 150,000 = 3,600,000
Adding 157,225,000 + 3,600,000 = 160,825,000 people either working or looking for work. And obviously, if the unemployment rate is 10% we should have about 144,742,500
working and drawing a paycheck.
The actual number is – wait a minute on the whereas and let’s look at the whyfor!
We have a little problem here. The Treasury Department says third quarter 2009 employment taxes were down by 10.1% compared to third quarter 2008.
So the number of hours worked in the third quarter were 10.1% less this year than last year. And now we are coming up on the end of the fourth quarter – and employers are handing out more than 450,000 pink slips a week – and just over half that many are finding jobs.
While the Bureau of Economic Analysis says the third quarter of 2009 was up by 2.2%, look at the bottom section.
Federal spending was up by 8% or 2.6% of the whole. Subtract that, and the normal pre-Christmas inventory building boost of 2% or so – and the rest of the economy actually shrank by something close to 3%.
Now, when we factor all that in, plus the continued drop in employment in October and November and so far in December: AND remembering these numbers are based on Government numbers, the total percentage of people without jobs should be:
5.5 + 10.1 + 0.9 + 0.025 = 16.75%
The actual number is probably somewhat higher. Perhaps as high as 22%.
But an actual 16.75% unemployment rate means at least 26,422,812 Americans are ready and able to work, but cannot find a job.
And at Obama’s current cost of $2,250,000 per job created or saved, it will only cost $59,500,000,000,000.00 or the equivalent of almost four years of Americas Gross National Product to spend our way to full employment. How many generations of our grandchildren are you willing to mortgage for that?
Stranger