Oh, those slippery numbers!

 

 

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts"

 

Yesterday the "bromance" continued between Chris Matthews and the President. Seriously, there was so much hot passion on MSNBC, I considered putting a parental lock on my cable box. The highly partisan Matthews could hardly contain himself when talking about the whopping 7.7% unemployment rate. "When is the President going to get some credit for this recovery? When are the Republicans going to recognize things are going better and the stock market is in record territory?" For those who did not see it, Mr. Matthews was addressing (whom Rush calls) the low information voter. And to the low information voter, things look very, very good right now.

Well, every party needs a pooper, so I guess I am nominated once again to be "Mr. Rain Cloud". First off, lets talk about the workforce participation rate. What MSNBC did not tell us was that more people left the workplace last month than received new jobs. We continue to have a record number of people who are NOT working in this country. How many? About 90,000,000. If we had the same workplace participation as we did in 2008, the unemployment rate would be over 11%. However, that is using the often misleading "U3" unemployment rate. Using the unemployment rate true economists prefer the most ("U6"), the unemployment rate is still at 14.3%. The reason 'U6" is a better rate is that it takes into consideration the unemployed, the underemployed and the disenfranchised (those who just plain left).

However, if you really want to get "nit-picky", lets peel back the onion one more layer. How is the U3 unemployment for youth? For the African-American community? Well according to a March 2013 BLS report, consider the following:

adult men (7.1 percent)
adult women (7.0 percent)
teenagers (25.1 percent)
blacks (13.8 percent)
Hispanics (9.6 percent)

I am sorry - I seem to left one category out, and it is a whopper. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for African Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 reached 49 percent - a 25 year high. These are absolutely terrible numbers. In the last election, blacks and Hispanics voted over whelming for the President. After seeing these numbers, I have no clue as to why.

We also continue to have record food stamp usage in our country. Government reporting this month shows 47,800,000 people using the program which is over 15% of our total population. Household income dropped for the second straight year which put our poverty rate up to 16% with over 48,000,000 now living below the poverty line. Finally, about 10.8 million Americans are still “underwater” on their mortgages. Even though this number has shown some improvement, it is still a huge drag on our economy.

There are more "real" numbers I could point out, but that is for another day. I will close with this - the next time you hear a politician or a loyal media lap dog tell you the economy is hunky dorey, do your own homework. Sometimes the numbers being reported on are as slippery as a banana peel - or worse.