Unemployment

With the government's official unemployment figure now at 8.5%, the entire population is singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" but wait. You have to know how this is done.

If the U3 is 8.5%, and the U6 is around 16%, then things are getting better, right? Those numbers used to be a couple points higher, no? It turns out that if you have 100 people in your workforce, and 20 of them have no jobs, then you have an unemployment rate of 20%. Unless 10 of those 20 unfortunates have given up on finding work, in which case they are no longer in your workforce, which reduces that number to 90, of which only 10 are officially unemployed for an unemployment rate of 11% which is much better.

Bogus? Sure. but that's how the government does things when job 1 is getting re-elected. Go here for a much more detailed description including more links.

If you want some encouragement, you can try drinking or go here to hear the MSM call this the best recovery ever.

Having people drop out of the workforce and either starve in the streets or join the gray economy makes the administration look bad. See the opening minutes of Moscow On The Hudson for examples. The stricter sorts of regimes have developed a method of dealing with unemployment that is simplicity itself: They make it illegal. The charge is "parasitism" and is punishable by a long stretch in an isolated prison camp doing worthwhile work for the government, like cutting timber or digging in a mine. The old Soviet Union was always proud to point out that its unemployment rate regularly hovered around zero.

Here, this was called the WPA.