Must be nice to be the chief executive of the worlds lone superpower and still have the mainstream media at your back no matter your performance. In fact, the MSM lapdogs have been especially vigilant when things are looking bleak. Such is the case today as the unemployment rate in the U.S. is reported to be 9.4% through July after being 9.5% through June. Good news, right? Well, the media paints it as such, breaks out the pom-poms and tells everyone within earshot that the recession is essentially over. BUT - then you start digging, and what you dig up is fool's gold. Even the AP couldn't cover this up entirely. From the AP via The Detroit Free Press: National jobless rate falls to 9.4%. Employers throttled back on layoffs in July, cutting just 247,000 jobs, the fewest in a year, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.4%, its first decline in 15 months.
It was a better-than-expected showing that offered a strong signal that the recession is finally ending.The new snapshot, released this morning by the Labor Department, also offered other encouraging news: workers’ hours nudged up after sinking to a record low in June, and paychecks grew after having fallen or flat lined in some cases.
To be sure, the report still indicates that the jobs market is on shaky ground. But the new figures were better than many analysts were expecting and offered welcomed improvements to a part of the economy that has been clobbered by the recession.
Analysts were forecasting job losses to slow to around 320,000 and the unemployment rate to tick up to 9.6%.
The dip in the unemployment rate — from June’s 9.5% — was the first since April 2008. One of the reasons the rate went down, however, was because hundreds of thousands of people left the labor force. Fewer people, though, did report being unemployed.
All told, there were 14.5 million out of work in July.
If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included the unemployment rate would have been 16.3% in July. That’s down from 16.5% in June, which was the the highest on records dating to 1994.
Nice to bury that in the middle of all the "good" news, no? Just for good measure, the AP trots out its standard canard that the recession began in December 2007, rather than the summer of 2008:
Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6.7 million jobs.That would be whitewashing. Since a recession starts when there are 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP, let's see what the actual data says:
Well, so much for that canard. The recession began in Q3 of 2008, not December 2007. It is simply a bald-faced lie by the AP and The Detroit Free Press. Even if it were true, though, which it is not, it would still mean that the majority of jobs were lost by Obama in a fraction of the time! Let's also not forget that it was Democrat policies that basically forced affirmative action policies into bank lending that caused the mortgage meltdown last fall. And let's not lose track of the big picture:January US jobs lost: 598,000 jobs
February US jobs lost: 706,000 jobs
March US jobs lost: 742,000 jobs
April US jobs lost: 545,000 jobs
May US jobs lost: 345,000 jobs
June US jobs lost: 467,000 jobs
July US jobs lost: 247,000Total US jobs lost under Obama: 3,650,000 jobs
Remember that teh stimulus package was supposed to stopt the unemployment rate at 8%! A crisis could become a calamity? Remember that? Here's how that looks:
Note that the blue lines are the numbers that Obama's team came up with. So the actual unemployment rate is not only worse that what would happen with porkulus, but even worse than was predicted without it. The May unemployment rate of 9.4% is the same as July.
UPDATE: Ace has an updated graphic in his post: Unemplyment, Part II: Rate Goes Down Only Because 300,000 People Exited the Workplace (That Is, Gave Up Looking for Work); "Discouraged Workers" Meme No Longer Operative.
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