New math, Washington style?

[pooltchr]

Someone please help me understand.
The US lost 95,000 jobs last month, but unemployment remains the same.


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Steve

[sack316]

Workforce decrease (?)... rise in those who have given up looking (?). Who knows... see if you can find stats on real unemployment and see if that went up (it's usually 7-10 percentage points higher).

Sack

[sack316]

looking at it a little, mixed good and bad news in this.

Private sector actually gained jobs (64,000)... very good thing (but still short 125,000 net "new jobs" needed to keep up with organic growth in the workforce). Government lost 159,000 (local gov't feeling crunch, end of census temp jobs etc) which leads to the net loss of 95,000.

Good/bad is the number of people involuntarily working part time increased by 612,000 in September to 9.5 million. So one thing not reflected in unemployment rate is those 9.5 million who are currently underemployed (good cuz they are not unemployed... bad because they are underemployed).

The real rate (taking into account underemployed, those who have stopped looking for work, and true seasonal adjustments) is over 17.1%!

Sack

[LWW]

Gallup ... and we all know that G has claimed Gallup to be infallible ... calls it at 10.1% UE.

LWW