Originally posted by mythatsabigprobe
New unemployment (which is what I mentioned in my post) has dropped from 750k per month in Jan 2009 to around 450k per month. That's almost a 50% drop.
...and it has been shown MANY TIMES that those numbers are FAKE... Many of those people who WERE in unemployment and reached the maximum amount of time they could be in uneployment are not counted anymore, neither are the people who used to work full-time and have only been able to get part-time jobs, among many others...
The real unemployment rate? 16.6%
The Labor Departments statistics dont include the underemployed and those who have stopped looking for work. This alternative measure creates a much higher number.
[Related content: jobs, construction, manufacturing, economy, financial crisis]
By Mary Engel
MSN Money
It's bad enough that the nation's jobless rate is 9.7%. But the real national employment rate is even higher than the U.S. Department of Labor's May figure shows.
The official unemployment index, based on a monthly survey of sample households, counts only people who reported looking for work in the past four weeks. It doesnt account for part-time workers who want to work more hours but cant, given the tight job market. And it doesnt include those who have given up trying to find work.
When the underemployed and the discouraged are added to the numbers, the unemployment rate rises to 16.6%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Labor Department, began tracking this alternative measure -- known as the U-6 for its department classification -- in 1995 after economists lobbied for a method comparable to the way Japan, Canada and Western Europe count their unemployed.
The truth is that even the broader measure of unemployment doesnt fully capture how difficult the job market is for U.S. workers. It doesnt include self-employed workers whose incomes have shriveled. It doesnt look at former full-time employees who have accepted short-term contracts, without benefits, and at a fraction of their former salaries. And it doesnt count the many would-be workers who are going back to school, taking on more debt, in hopes that advanced degrees will improve their chances of landing jobs.
That broader unemployment rate, or U-6, is up from 16.4% a year ago and from 9.7% in May 2008. It was 7.1% in May 2000.
"It has gone up a lot because a lot of people have been put on short hours," said economist Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization. "And there are a lot of discouraged workers."
articles.moneycentral.msn.com...
.... you did not, and you want to claim that you do not get caught up in the Obama frenzy?... 
