Does anyone really believe these numbers?
Hell, Josh is reporting today of hundreds losing their jobs at Buzzfeed and Verizon. There are reports of hundreds if not thousands out of work with no pay due to the shutdown. I still donât see the impact of the Carrier and Harley Davidson actions.
How in the world are the unemployment numbers still positive?
Many yearâs ago I asked labor secretary Ray Marshall about underemployment, which we also track. âItâs a third rail.â Here we are 40 years later, and itâs still headline U3 and no discussion of the fact that half of Americans are working poor. Indeed, headline unemployment tells very little about wealth or health of the nation. Bangladesh also has a 4% unemployment rate. China always has a 4% unemployment rate. At some point we will shift the discussion to dependency ratios, underemployment, technology frontiers, robot underemployment, etc. because the unemployment number without context is meaningless.
Proving once again what a âstable genius!â we have for president
UmmmmmâŚprobably a stupid question, but here goes.
Are the offices which process unemployment aid applications among those affected by the shutdown? If yes, could the drop be due to nobody there to enter/process the paperworkâŚ
Itâs right in the article: Labor Department is one of those which had funding passed before the shutdown. So no.
Thatâs what happen when you just go straight to the comments without reading the full article⌠
Yup. I had to make a practice to read not just the whole TPM article, but the original source article or source document (if any), before I hit the Reply button to submit whatever hot take was my first reaction.
Generally I do too (see my post on the thread re:Kellyanne DeVil), but this time I was lazy. Sigh. Lesson learned.
Sometimes the comments are more insightful though. Doubly so for AP articles and Trump tweets.
If so, there will be an eventual correction that no one will report on.
Yeah, a lot of times I have already read something somewhere else (TPM is generally not the first source on this stuff), so I jump to the comments, especially when there are legal things discussed and I know our resident legal geniuses will have some good tips .
Sometimes you just swing and miss.
Lots of people got hired in the last 2-4 months so this might be reflective of that. But I can tell you that many CEOs are viewing this first quarter with a lot of trepidation. People are focusing on getting bills paid, nailing down business that was discussed prior to the new year but is now may be in question. I think the govât and economy could recover fairly quickly if the shutdown ends within the coming week. However, if it were to go all the way through February, then I think weâre in real trouble.
And if the trade war with China ends within the coming week.
And if the tariff clashes with Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea end within the coming week.
And if there are no natural disasters within the coming week.
And if there are no major terrorist attacks nor military incursions within the coming week.
âYou let me write $300,000,000.00 worth of hot checks a year and I to could give you an illusion of prosperityâ, Lloyd Benson 1988 on Reaganomics.
There are two points that need to be made, the first is by blowing up the deficit at a time of already low unemployment the economy is going to have a short term bump that is good for employment.
The second point, made by Bill Maher in the last of his âNew Rulesâ on his last show is that the Government Shutdown is most notable for how bad things have gotten for the once Middle Class not being able to miss a single paycheck without suffering financial ruin. That is compared to 50 years ago, what remains of the Middle Class is not really Middle Class because they are one paycheck from becoming poor. That since the 1960s the Middle Class has lost the ability to pay for education, healthcare and just about everything else as they struggle to meet basic bills. Or to put another way, as taxes have been cut for the wealthy allowing them to keep more of their money the result has been less for everyone else resulting in an almost feudal society where there are a few supper rich and powerful and everyone else fights for the scraps that fall off their tables.
Evidently the trade wars and the shutdown have had no effect on employment or, according to the Trump administration stats, a positive effect. The daily stories you read about GM closing plants, Boeing cutting jobs, Verizon cutting jobs etc etc etc are just minor blips and donât represent the general economic trends, if you believe these numbers. I donât. For some time they have struck me as awfully suspicious. Mnuchin, Ross, and Hassett are all experienced at cooking books.
If we want to have a middle class, we should look at countries with a robust middle class. Since there is absolutely no evidence that our wealthy would voluntarily accept a narrow gap between boss wealth and worker wealth as we saw in Japan after WWII, the likely answer is an aggressive tax scheme such as Denmark or Sweden. All kinds of problems vanish when you have a large middle class. Denmarkâs government-debt-to-GDP is a manageable 37% (US 110%). People are happier. University is affordable and there is social mobility. The ratio of public to private goods and services production is a near-perfect 40-60 ratio. You rarely hear, what is dogma in the US, that the private sector can do everything cheaper and better. Not true, but you may not realize this if youâve never experienced life in a country with universal health care.
Yes, Danes have a stable government, low levels of public corruption, and access to high-quality education and health care. The country does have the the highest taxes in the world, but the vast majority of Danes happily pay: They believe higher taxes can create a better society.
First line processing is at the state level, which are not effected by the shutdown.
However, there is a Federal UC for civilian ex-federal employees (but not regular paycheck deductions). It is also administered by States as agents of the Federal government.
At first glance, this story also troubled me and made me ask what the heck is going on. One significant thing directly affecting this is the fact that all those federal employees who are currently furloughed are probably NOT applying for unemployment benefits. Were they to do so, then you can be sure the effect would be quite large.
Right now, everyone is in a state of suspension waiting to see what eventually happens. But that isnât going to last for long. People are going to need to get other jobs because they canât wait forever for the old one to come back.
Dark times indeedâŚ
Yes, I do believe the numbers, for now:
- Any story about layoffs is just an isolated example, not a statement about the macroeconomics of the country. Considering that over a year ago companies got a 10% tax break, there should be a significant amount of capital out there to fuel hiring and growth in the US (it essentially made American companies more competitive globally to operate in the US).
- Even assuming that 800,000 government workers are essentially laid-off right now until the shutdown ends, the labor force is about 150 million people. 0.8M/150M = 0.5% of the labor force. It takes a lot of people losing jobs to see it in the numbers. And, these people arenât unemployed, theyâre just not getting paid â even worse maybe.
- I believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics cares about their work products and, despite whoever the Trump administration puts at the top, the administration canât (easily) fabricate numbers that would pump up the economy. The data is the data, analyzed by data scientists.
- Macroeconomic effects will take a while to be felt. It is a drip drip drip change, and the shutdown was only a month ago.
- And the data probably doesnât capture most of the shutdown. If the data review period ended 31 Dec, there is about a week of shutdown time there, where workers were probably still being paid anyway.