Data points on the economy

[unixronin]

• The "official" unemployment rate among males aged 25-54 is 5.1%.

  However, this does not include those who have given up looking for work, which the Department of Labor calls "discouraged workers" and refers to as the "U-6 level".  Neither does it include people scraping up just a few hours aprt-time; if you work one hour per week, the government considers you employed.

  These so-called “discouraged” workers could include computer programmers who cannot find work because the work is being shipped overseas, people who have no childcare, and a variety of other situations that are standing in the way of employment.  Then there are people who are so-called independent contract workers (“1099 workers”) who are rarely counted, and other groups within the labor force who want work but are not counted for a variety of reason.

  Consolidating all the applicable US Department of Labor statistics yields an actual jobless rate among men aged 25-54 of 13.1% — more than one in eight, the second highest rate since World War 2.

• Meanwhile, consumer prices rose 0.34% in March, equivalent to an annual inflation rate of 4%, but "core inflation" stands at only 2.4% annually (a 0.15% rise in March).

  However, "if the government measured inflation based on pre-1982 methods, it would be running at 11.6 percent right now, or 7.3 percent using pre-1998 calculations."

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I know the reporting of unemployment numbers is consistent, but reporting data consistently wrongly is still dishonest. The problem is not one of inconsistency; it's that they're cooking the books in a way that does not actually track the real data. It makes unemployment rates seem both much lower, and much more stable than they truly are.

As you note, the continual redefinition of inflation is even worse. The erosion of trust in the government will come back to bite them, I think. If the government can't be believed about things that affect so many people's lives so severely, why should they be believed about anything else? But the Beltway insiders all seem to think they can just keep pulling the wool over people's eyes forever without consequences.