Friday, July 2, 2010

The Unemployment Crisis

Really bad news: (via Ezra Klein)


A brutal unemployment report this month. Payrolls dropped by 125,000. In another one of those unwanted lessons in how we calculate unemployment data, the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7 percent to 9.5 percent -- but not because people got hired. Instead, 652,000 people gave up and stopped looking for work. And that number might be higher than it looks, as the natural monthly growth in the labor force is about 100,000 -- so to see a 652,000-person drop might mean something like 752,000 current workers left as 100,000 new workers entered.
The Douche caucus doesn't take this stuff seriously cause they're assholes, and Ben Bernanke doesn't believe lowering unemployment is his job, and the rest of Obama's econ team is too busy repeating Republican talking points about deficit reduction to spend any political capital on something that might help the situation.

Obama could have chosen Stiglitz, Krugman or Baker but instead he hired Summers, Bernanke, the very people whose ideology is responsible for the economic crisis we have today.

As atrios often says, he doesn't "hope" for bad news, but he hopes for something that will get the Administration's attention on the severity of this crisis. Maybe these numbers will do it, maybe they wont. All I know is that if they'd tackled this problem with half the crisis rhetoric/bullshit committee making energy that they've put into fighting the non existent problem of running a deficit during a rescission, we'd be in a far, far better place.

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