Monday, October 25, 2010

Wingers Discover The U-6 Figures

The big kerfluffle this morning is this 60 Minutes story on America's unemployed and underemployed, the labor department's U-6 figure.  I've been talking about this for, I don't know, years now?

The national unemployment rate of about nine and a half percent sounds incredibly high and of course it is. But it doesn't nearly capture the depth of the trouble. It doesn't count the people who've seen their hours cut to part time. It doesn't count the people who have quit looking for work.

If you add all of that together, the unemployed and the underemployed, it's not nine and a half percent, it's 17 percent; and in California it's 22 percent.

And what makes it so much worse is that, nationwide, one third of the unemployed have been out of work more than a year. That hasn't happened since the Depression.

You mean wingers are just now noticing the fact the U-6 has been 17% plus for years now? Hey guys, try reading a friggin BLS website or an economic report once in a while. The underemployment rate in this country has been over 15% for 18 months now and has been hovering around 17% for all of this year.

This isn't news to anybody who has been paying attention, that Obama inherited this mess and gosh, it's taking longer than 2 years to fix it.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you admit we've had near Great Depression levels of unemployment in this country since Obama took office. I can't imagine then why anyone would think Obama has failed on the economy then...

StarStorm said...

Because he inherited that level of unemployment and things have been just getting worse, especially in the financial sector.

One could argue that Obama hasn't been very good on the economy. I have to give him credit for trying, but there's these people, you know, who seem to think that 40% is a majority and that, oh my stars, putting these people to work is so expensive, especially with all the financial crises and we need to save the tax cuts and cut taxes more so that the wealthy can trickle down their riches to the teeming masses who don't deserve it because they won't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go get a job like hardworking wealthy people do.

And by "riches", I mean "shit".

Seriously. I wouldn't be pinning this on Obama, or solely on Obama, but hey, he's the most visible.

SteveAR said...

You mean wingers are just now noticing the fact the U-6 has been 17% plus for years now?

Neither of the sites you link to say that. The Pajamas Media piece notes that it's just about the first time that the MSM actually mentions the U-6 numbers.

Hey guys, try reading a friggin BLS website or an economic report once in a while.

We do.

The underemployment rate in this country has been over 15% for 18 months now and has been hovering around 17% for all of this year.

This isn't news to anybody who has been paying attention, that Obama inherited this mess and gosh, it's taking longer than 2 years to fix it.


I hate to break the news to you, but Obama has been in office for 21 months. What he inherited is immaterial; what matters is that the policies put in by Obama and Democrats in Congress have made things worse, not better. This is very similar to what happened during the Great Depression. Far from doing nothing (the usual liberal line), Hoover did a great many things to expand government following the stock market crash of 1929, all of them wrong. After FDR got in, he became Hoover on steroids (much like Obama is Bush on steroids), which is why the Depression lasted so long. The difference between FDR and Obama is that FDR had a much better propaganda machine put in place.

This is why the U.S. has to throw as many Democrats in Congress out of office to keep from further exacerbating the problem, repeating history, and begin correcting things.

Unknown said...

Someone's been getting his history from textbooks approved by the state of Texas.

Anonymous said...

How is the economic conditions of a country with a Democrat controlled White house and Democrat controlled Congress not the fault of the Democrats?

Anonymous said...

it's either "how ARE the economic conditions" or "how IS the economic condition".

idiot.

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