I've lost interest in the official unemployment rate

Frankly, I'm not sure I even care any more about the official U3 unemployment rate that gets published by the U.S. Department of Labor.  After seeing months of weird results where the economy adds an anemic number of jobs or actually lost jobs and the unemployment rate still dropped, a number of bloggers and journalists on the right did our part to start explaining the U6 unemployment rate which includes people who have stopped looking for jobs and is always a worse, but more realistic picture.  But the U6 started to look odd as well.  As labor force participation dropped to historic lows, the unemployment rate continued its gradual decline.  Certainly the government department wasn't fudging the results by doing things like constantly revising upward the numbers after the initial release hoping nobody would notice.  Oh wait, they were doing that.

Last week the unemployment rate in the U.S. for September was released.  It dropped in September (it was announced late incidentally, because of the government shutdown) to 7.2%.  But the economy doesn't feel like things are getting better.

U.S. businesses added a modest 148,000 jobs in September, far short of the 180,000 analysts were expecting. Still, job gains were enough to lower the unemployment rate to 7.2 percent, the lowest in nearly five years. But, the first jobs report since the government shutdown suggests the U.S. economy may be losing steam.

Concerns about the tepid U.S. recovery may be hurting the job market.

How many Recovery Summers does it take to actually equal a full recovery?  The saying numbers don't lie is being overpowered by the Mark Twain saying "there are lies, damned lies and statistics." The economy is sputtering not flourishing. Businesses are retrenching in order to maintain profit margins. Sears is just the latest example.

 

I guess the message here is trust your senses, and not what you read or see in the news and certainly not what your government is telling you.  Or at the very least, consider them before swallowing whole the official line of the Department of Labor.

National Fast Food Strike Exposes the Real Problem

The news about a national fast food strike is front page Occupy Wall Street stuff, except the real headline is going to be being buried in the story.

 

Via CBS (emphasis added):

Employees of fast food restaurants are striking in cities around the country, bolstered by support from labor unions, churches, and other groups, demanding $15 an hour wages and a greater ability to unionize. Many consumers have complained that the expectations are unreasonable, given the type of work and the skills and drive they assume must be lacking in the workers.

However, government statistics and studies suggest that the common picture of the fast food worker is inaccurate. Not only are relatively few of them teenagers looking for some pocket money while attending school, but the number of adults working in low-paying part-time jobs against their wishes is rapidly growing.

Wasn't the recovery summer in 2009 2010 2011 or something?  The real story is that the unemployment rate recovery under Obama is even more illusory than originally imagined. We assume that the employment situation was worse than the slowly recovering unemployment rate has indicated, but CBS inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag - employment numbers are being underpinned by people doing jobs they are ay overqualified for because they can't find better quality work.

 

Why isn't that the headline, or at least the thrust of the story? Oh yeah, because this president still gets a free pass.