Unemployment - Who Is To Blame?

There's an old saying - do what you've always done, get what you've always gotten.

The Stimulus hasn't worked. Job creation is at a standstill. (At least, job creation in the private sector).

Can these politicians - in particular Obama and his economic advisors, sit down and look at this stuff and say - okay, we tried the stimulus and it didn't work. So let's not try another. What can we do instead?

Some people think that the unemployment rate today going up to 9.2% pretty much means that there's no way a responsible Republican leader would cave, with the unemployment news continuing to be bad, therefore Obama's policy obviously being destructive, there is no way, Rush, don't worry about it, Rush, there's no way a responsible leader's gonna cave, that 9.2% unemployment figure's a game-changer. What do you mean? It just went up one-tenth of a point. Why wasn't 9.1% a game-changer? What, on Thursday they're talking about possibly caving so go from 9.1 to 9.2, well, that takes the cave off the table. A lot of wishful thinking going out there.

This is the Wall Street Journal: "The unemployment rate increased to 9.2% in June, the Labor Department reported, but if the recession hadn’t pushed so many people out of the labor market it would have been much worse. The duration of unemployment continues to increase and sat at an average of 39.9 weeks in June. More than four million people who want jobs, or nearly a third of the unemployed, have been out of work for more than a year. Those are the people are hanging in and looking for work, but a large number have given up altogether. The share of the population in the jobs market, called the labor-force participation rate, fell to 64.1% last month -- the lowest level since 1984 when women were still just beginning to enter in full force."

So the bottom line is the calculation's been done here. Without the people who have dropped out, if you still counted the people who no longer look for work, the U3 unemployment number, which is the one that's reported every week, would be over 11%. And the U6 number would be up over 17%. The AP today, reporting the 9.2% rate, headlines it this way: "Unemployment Rose to 9.2% as Hiring Stalls -- Hiring slowed to a near standstill last month. Employers added the fewest jobs in nine months. The unemployment rate rose to 9.2%." You notice how they put that, "hiring slowed." Unemployment has gone up. It would seem that hiring has done more than slowed. But at least you have to give AP credit for trying to put the best face they can on this latest bad news, and it's bad news, and everybody, Reuters, AP, Politico, they are all trying to spin this with the biggest smiley face they can find.

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