Unemployment figures are not accurate

We saw the government come out with unemployment statistics for the month of January this week that indicated that the number of unemployed people decreased to just under 10%. These figures are annoying because like just about everything else that the government and the media feed us, they are grossly inaccurate and intended to deceive us.

The unemployment rates that we read about in the “news” represent the number of people who are collecting unemployment benefits from the government. Any ordinary person who walks the streets with a pulse and some common sense knows that there are many, many, many people who are either out of work completely, or working part-time or at temporary jobs and not making enough to support themselves who are not collecting.

We live in a culture where it is expected that there is some readily available, unimpeachable and accurate metric to measure all things, but this is simply not the case. If you are out of work and not collecting unemployment, you don’t exist as far as these statistics are concerned. People aren’t going to go door to door to find out if you are working or not to compile these statistics, so the real unemployment rate is going to be a guess.

You would have to estimate that if you combined the ten percent of the people who are collecting unemployment with the totally unemployed folks who are not collecting, and those who are making some pocket money while living with mom and dad, friends, or a spouse, the real unemployment rate must be somewhere around 30%. And this doesn’t include the millions of people working full time who are making between $7-$12 an hour, amounts that really don’t enable one to do much more than merely survive. (And for the record, don’t even think about the possibility of job satisfaction these days.)

Don’t fall for phony statistics from the government and the media’s spin on them. We are in a true employment crisis, and it is not an accident. It’s a modern form of slavery.