The latest unemployment numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, show the national unemployment rate fell to 10.0 percent in November. In the prior 3 months, they report, job losses had averaged 135,000 a month.
Averaging job losses over a three month period makes the 135,000, as bad as it is, appear less harsh. But October’s 190,000 job losses exceeded administration projections of 175,000 — alarming enough. Nearly 15.4 million people remain unable to find jobs in the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.5 million, and the jobless rate was 4.9 percent
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million – exceeding last month’s all-time record 5.6 million.
Arizona’s unemployment numbers are available here.
About 2.3 million persons were “marginally attached to the labor force” in November, an increase of 376,000 from a year earlier. These individuals were not in the labor force, but wanted to be, were available for work, and had sought a job within the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
These staggering numbers represent families without income and the inability to pay rent, insurance, put gas in their cars, make basic purchases and put food on the table. Yet such harsh realities have not deterred the Democrats pushing Obama’s $1 trillion federalized takeover of health care.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been implementing strategic changes to their news releases, aiming for” tighter analytical focus.” They write: “The textual changes for some of the releases will be fairly modest, while for others the analytical content may be more noticeably different.” The changes, they report, result from elicited “feedback of focus groups with journalists; an evaluation by BLS cognitive psychologists who assist the Bureau in assessing the clarity of its public offerings.”
Huh?
In plain English we read that to mean that the Obama administration is dismayed with the continued plummeting unemployment numbers and is working overtime to conceal from the American people how dire the situation actually is.
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