Every time the mainstream media touts some “wonderful new economic numbers” I just want to cringe. Yes, it is true that the economic numbers have gotten slightly better since Donald Trump entered the White House, but the rosy economic picture that the mainstream media is constantly painting for all of us is completely absurd.
Let’s start by talking about unemployment.
We are being told that the unemployment rate in the United States is currently “3.8 percent”, which would be the lowest that it has been “in nearly 50 years”.
To support this claim, the mainstream media endlessly runs articles declaring how wonderful everything is. For example, the following is from a recent New York Times article entitled “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”…
The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.
So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.
Doesn’t that sound great?
It would be great, if the numbers that they were using were honest.
The truth, of course, is that the percentage of the population that is employed has barely budged since the depths of the last recession. According to John Williams, if honest numbers were being used the unemployment rate would actually be 21.5 percent today.
So what is the reason for the gaping disparity?
As I have explained repeatedly, the government has simply been moving people from the “officially unemployed” category to the “not in the labor force” category for many, many years.
If we use the government’s own numbers, there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now. That is higher than it was at any point during the last recession.
We are being conned. I have a friend down in south Idaho that is a highly trained software engineer that has been out of work for two years.
If the unemployment rate is really “3.8 percent”, why can’t he find a decent job?
By the way, if you live in the Boise area and you know of an opening for a quality software engineer, please let me know and I will get the information to him.
Read the rest of the article at ZeroHedge: The ‘Real’ America: 21.5% Unemployment, 10% Inflation, And Negative Economic Growth | ZeroHedge