Monday, June 11, 2012

Employment numbers

Listening to a stock touter talk on a business network the other day, I was taken with how he could sit there with a straight face and praise the number of new jobs being created. According to him there were about 100,000 each month so far this year. I doubt there is any accurate way to calculate the number of people who find a job.

But newly unemployed people are easy to count because they get a check. The number of people filing for unemployment compensation for the first time has been 350,000 or more every week for the past year. That's more than a million newly unemployed every month for the past year or ten times the number of new jobs supposedly created.

As with all Washington smoke and mirror accounting, the numbers are subject to change and sure enough they revise that mythical job creation number downward each and every month. So what is the real number? I don't think the inept crowd in DC has a clue.

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