How to lie with statistics

Tighty righties are always saying, "the economy is doing fine! Unemployment is low! People are making more money than ever! U S A! U S A! WOOT!". So what's the real story?

Answer: SNAFU (Situation Normal, All F*cked Up). According to the Feds, the economy has lost 500,000 jobs over the past six months. According to the Feds, the economy needs to add 100,000 jobs every month to account for population growth. (See: News stories in every major newspaper after the Feds released June's employment figures). Ergo: There are 1.1 million more unemployed Americans today than there were in January.

Question: Where are they?

Answer: They've been "disappeared" as "no longer in workforce". You can verify this with labor force participation statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For example, here's June's numbers straight from the BLS web site:

Change in Unemployment Level: +12,000 in Jun 2008
Change in Employment Level: -155,000 in Jun 2008
Change in Civilian Labor Force Level: -144,000 in Jun 2008

Only 12,000 of the newly-unemployed workers in June were considered "unemployed" and counted in the unemployment statistics. 144,000 unemployed people were "disappeared" as "no longer in workforce", and the BLS isn't even shy about it, knowing that the average American, even if he notices this, will merely scratch his head rather than realize that this is a systematic scam to produce false unemployment numbers (an old scam, BTW -- Clinton's BLS did it too, during Clinton's "full employment" I saw plenty of people looking for work who weren't being counted as "unemployed", I was working for a small computer shop at the time and we were always having people knocking on our door looking for work even though we supposedly had "full employment"). This trend continues on backward if you look at previous BLS news releases -- most of the newly unemployed have been counted as "no longer in workforce" rather than, well, unemployed. They aren't employed. They aren't unemployed. They just aren't.

Regarding income growth, real inflation-adjusted wages have declined by approximately 7% since the 1970's. The inflation-adjusted median wage for an American male was $45,000 in 1977, and $41,500 in 2004 (note: statistics from U.S. Census Bureau, 2004, latest I found at the time I was compiling them).

However, median family income has increased to $48000 over that time. How did that happen? More women working, duh. But there are no more women to add to the workforce, thus the declining median wage is hitting all families now, not just single-parent families.

In short: Statistics show that the economy is FUBAR. The only reason the unemployment statistics aren't showing 15%+ unemployment is because hundreds of thousands of Americans are being classified as not employed, not unemployed, just... not. No people, no problem. Stalin was an amateur compared to our current government statisticians, who don't need a gulag to disappear people, why, they do it with the stroke of a pen every day!

We're still nowhere near Great Depression levels of poverty and unemployment, and hopefully our new President in November will do something to encourage employers to start employing more Americans that'll keep us out of that, sorta like the Canadians do (they give massive tax credits to people creating new qualifying jobs up there, to the point where if you open a factory in Canada, your entire workforce is basically "free" for the first three years -- one reason why so many auto assembly plants have moved north of the border). Unfortunately, until the outrageous health care costs in the U.S. are dealt with, it's still going to be hard to encourage manufacturing jobs to come back to the United States... and every solution proposed to cure outrageous health care costs in the U.S. are derided and called "socialism" by folks who have no idea what "socialism" is, but who know it's bad, whatever it is. Sigh. Ignorance. The world's #1 renewable resource.

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin