DJH: President Obama is having quite the summer. First a family vacation in Maine and then he hits the road to talk up the economy and make fun of republicans. I find is a little disturbing that MY PRESIDENT takes such joy in cracking jokes about conservatives and the Tea Party, but honestly, it’s the least of my concerns.
It's Summertime, and the Living is Easy...
What really bothers me is having a president who is in denial about the true state of unemployment in this country.
Getting After the Real Unemployment Rate
I am no conspiracy theorist, but the truth is, the government really, really, really wants the unemployment rate to go down, and the government is the one who does the survey that tells us what the unemployment rate is. Isn’t this just a bit of a conflict of interest?
Enter TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence
I just discovered an independent (private sector) company that also measures unemployment in America. The company is TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, they are partners with Investors Business Daily, and claim to have been the most accurate polling company for both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Most importantly they also calculate the unemployment rate and their numbers are dramatically different from Obama’s; not only that, they’re freaking frightening, take a look:
- In May they surveyed 1,000 American households and discovered that 28% reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job.
- The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job
- The latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation.
The July report translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%!
I got these numbers from an article by Pallavi Gogoi in AOL’s Daily Finance web site; but wait, there’s more in this story:
“Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn’t available to comment.”
“The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren’t going to be thinking as big as they should be,” says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. “It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn’t going to be there.”
” Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who’ve given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.”
“Isn’t it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted,” says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. “It’s what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success.”
Source: AOL’s DailyFinance:
Clearly, there are number of people who are now starting to talk about Obama “cooking the books” on the unemployment numbers. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out my piece — Obama’s June 2010 Jobs Report: 1.2 Million Discouraged Workers — New World Record!
How Did Obama Let This Happen?
Rich Karlgaard tackled this question in Forbes yesterday in a piece titled The Forgotten Employer. It’s great piece and I urge you to read it, but let me give you a couple of tasty excerpts:
“There is $1.8 trillion of cash reserves held by American companies–and those are just the publicly traded ones– and conclude that business has gone on a capital strike.”
“Business is refusing to invest aggressively in the future, including hiring more people, in an atmosphere of rising taxes and regulations, not to mention overt rhetorical attacks on business by President Obama.”
“I understand the left’s reluctance to talk to employers directly. Talking to employers about jobs, and lack thereof, would wreck the left’s narrative. What do you hear when you listen to employers? You hear stories like this one, from the comments section of a recent Mort Zuckerman piece:
I am a building designer, used to have employees and wanted to grow my firm to about 8 people. No longer. I will be more likely semi-retired by choice from this point on because:
Cost of Employees way up: Workman’s Comp, Unemployment insurance, Health Care is up by nearly $ 8 per hour over 3 years. Health care alone now costs $4 an hour if they are young, over $5 per hour if over 50.
Business Regulation – every purchase over $ 600 needs a 1099 form, meaning I have to get the address and the tax ID of the power company, the insurance company, Office Depot, etc. I will be going from 4 1099’s to over 100.
Health Care – I will now have to track where my employees go in the event of HazMat exposure. Did the government office they measured in for a few days contain lead or asbestos. Duh – yes, but it is supposedly safe for government employees why not mine.
Security – I must have lots more records on my employees keyed to their SS#, but if somehow I lose my laptop I am a crook.
I could go on and on, but my reward is:
My marginal tax rate jumps in 2011, about 30% more than before.
the FICA income limit keeps rising, that is 15% of net for the self employed on the marginal increase.
It is obvious that there will be a lot more taxes coming. So my risk is way up, but the government now TAKES over half of any marginal increase. I would rather fish.
Take a minute and read what this small business owner said again…
Is there any wonder why the unemployment rate has hit these highs, or any doubt that there is a solid case to be made that Obama’s policies may well be turning a recession into the second great depression?
Regardless, this whole elusive recovery has become a classic “chicken and egg” argument and it looks like it’s not going away any time soon. Obama constantly questions the motives and integrity of private sector businesses and he seems to believe that more taxes and regulations will somehow improve the private sector economy. Business leaders say they don’t trust Obama, they think he’s out to get them, and they have no plans to hire as long as the president keeps taxing, over-regulating, and badmouthing them.
One things clear, the level of animosity between the president and business is at am all time high. And right now the biggest victims are the (mostly) private sector unemployed American.
Whether the number is 9.5% or 22% isn’t really the issue; both are bad and it looks like they’ll get worst before they get better!
Dave
[…] recent piece I did called “What is the Real Unemployment Rate: Would You Believe 22%?”, I highlighted a small business owner who reported that Obamacare has increased his cost of labor […]
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Don’t forget about all of our people in Iraq and Afgan. What will they do to the unemployment figures when they return home to no jobs? That is, if our president ever fulfills his campaign promises to have our people home within a year (by October of 2009?).
[…] United States! This will squeeze whatever is left of private capital out of the economy and make the current 22% unemployment rate the “new […]
SGS and TechnoMetrica have it right, 22% of the U.S. labor force are unemployed. It is relatively simple math. What is amazing is, that most of the drones who watch the mainstream- I mean lamestream media swallow this crap whole and never seem to question the ridiculous claims of an approximate 9% U-3 rate.
No, the drones would rather watch Amercian Idiot or Dancing with Dopes. Instead of engaging in the issues that are destroying our nation.
We (collectively) need to keep writing, speaking and informing all the people we can. All who will listen, about what is truly going on. Truth above all.