Back in June, Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture complained that "U3," the Bureau of Labor Statistics' official rate of unemployment, the one that gets reported by 99% of the megamedia and the blogmedia, is just not accurate.
It has, over the years, slowly excluded many of the factors that USED to go into how the US reported unemployment. Hence, there has been a gradual decrease in the Unemployment rate that has occurred regardless of what was happening in the Jobs market.
U3 is now comprised in a way that merely repeating it without a slew of caveats borders on fraud.
As of the beginning of this month, that bordering-on-fraud unemployment rate had risen to 6.5%.
This statistical slipperiness began in the Reagan years, when government-gathered data on a broad range of matters besides unemployment were diluted, rejiggered and sometimes vanished altogether in an effort to keep the public disinformed. Beginning in the Clinton era, however, the BLS began also to report "U6." This broad gauge of unemployment includes everyone out of work and looking, workers who are not looking but would like a job and have sought one in the recent past until they became discouraged, and people who have settled for part-time employment but would work full time if they could find a full-time job.
As Daniel Gross at Slate observed, "The U6 is sort of the summa of job angst, a shorthand tally for the aggregate of job-related frustration."
It's not the BLS's fault the media don't report U6. The number is readily available every time the new unemployment numbers come out early each month. For October, the U6 was 11.1%. Last year at this time, it was 7.9%. Is U3 or the unofficial U6 the more realistic? Depends on what you seek to measure. Ritholtz argues the best approach would be for the media always to report both numbers. That suggestion would probably be met with demurrers that including both would confuse audiences. Nonsense, obviously.
Whichever figure you prefer, the grim consequences are all around us. In June, the U3 figure was 5.5%. That month, 404,000 Americans filed unemployment claims. It had become so tough for Americans to find work that Congress passed an emergency 13-week extension of unemployment benefits in July to help keep more of them from sliding into one of those U6 categories.
The situation hasn't improved. As Kai Filion at the Economic Policy Institute writes, last week, an additional 516,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits. That's the highest level since September 2001.
As anyone who has lived on unemployment benefits knows too well, it's tough sledding. But not as tough as going without. And, if Congress doesn't act soon, many Americans will be going without.
Over 890,000 unemployed workers already have exhausted their 13-week extension, and another 1.2 million are projected to exhaust benefits by year's end. Without these benefits, the Congressional Budget Office finds that about 50% of the long-term unemployed fall under the poverty line. Congress should act swiftly to extend benefits for another seven weeks in all states, and an additional 20 weeks (for a total of 33) in states with unemployment over 6.0%.
In all the talk of bailing out this company and bailing out that industry, workers who aren't working deserve some buckets too. Otherwise, it's dead certain the ranks of the frustrated, discouraged and the impoverished will swell. This will make no never mind to the majority of Republicans in Congress. Which is just one more reason to be delighted that fewer of them will be seated there come January.
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 11/17-19. Likely voters. MoE 4% (11/10-12 results)
Chambliss (R) 51 (49) Martin (D) 45 (46)
The Election NIght results of this race were 49-46 Chambliss. The poll last week, when asking respondents who they voted for on Election Night, came back 49-47. Today, that number is 52-44. That means that the likely voter screen is stripping out many Election Night Democratic voters, accounting for Chambliss' gains in this poll.
This, of course, is the danger in the special, especially in a red-leaning state like Georgia -- that many people who turned out for Obama won't turn out for Martin in a special. And given that many of those Election NIght voters are more casual voters (like young voters), this is a real factor.
Still, special elections feature funky turnouts, and Democrats have been recently successful in winning special elections in some seriously Red districts. This Senate race is higher profile than many of those low-interest House special elections, but fact is, the race is tight enough that the victor will win this thing on the ground.
Would Sarah Palin like to have you visit Alaska? You betcha!
Gov. Sarah Palin is personally inviting Americans from all over the country to visit her home state. Well, sort of. Letters bearing her picture, on letterhead that reads “Office of the Governor” and encouraging people to sign up for a free Alaska travel guide, have begun reappearing in mailboxes around the nation as part of an appeal from the Alaska Travel Industry Association.
Gawd, will this woman ever get out of our lives?
Today is the last day to vote for Burnt Orange Report's David Mauro to receive a college scholarship.
Another repudiation of a Bush administration policy:
A federal judge has ordered the release of five Algerian terror suspects who have been held without charges almost seven years at Guantanamo Bay.
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said Thursday that the five men could not be held indefinitely as enemy combatants.
For the serious political junkie only: watch the Minnesota senate race recount here.
Now that he's successfully led the country into its worse economic crisis in decades, George Bush is willing to sign an extension of unemployment benefits. Now watch this drive.
Beau Biden, the son of Vice President-elect Joe Biden, deployed to Iraq yesterday.
Bill O'Reilly really is a dope...from November 18th:
"Factor Follow-up" segment tonight: Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman was certified the winner in his race against Al Franken today. Coleman won by a mere 215 votes. But about 400,000 voters in Minnesota rejected Franken, while voting for Obama. They crossed the ticket to support Coleman, a stunning statistic.
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber,” has signed a deal to write a new book entitled “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream.” To capitalize on his recent fame, Wurzelbacher is planning to release it on Dec. 1 – less than two weeks from now. The New York Times reports that the book “will address Mr. Wurzelbacher’s ideas about American values.”
Click here to track flu trends in your state. - DemFromCT
The Free Republic and other conservative blogs have turned that college scholarship contest into an ideological proxy battle. Okay, if they want to try to sabotage Burnt Orange Report writer David Mauro's chances for the award, then that just gives us further incentive to help one of our own win the scholarship.
Yesterday I wrote about the great gains in Salt Lake County in Utah, but couldn't do a side-by-side comparison since AP hadn't updated its numbers. Well, they're updated, so I'm posting the comparison maps so we can marvel at what progress looks like:
2004:
2008:
The glowing county is Salt Lake, and notice how neighboring Summit County also turned blue. Mouse over every neighboring county, and they've all become less Republican. Sure, some of the gains are marginal, but it's all progress as long as it's moving in our direction. And the 80,000-vote swing in Salt Lake County will be the foundation upon which the rest of the state is gradually worked.
A month after calling for an investigation of fellow members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America," Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is now claiming that the whole episode was "an urban legend."
Asked about the comment Tuesday night on Fox’s "Hannity & Colmes," Bachmann said, "That’s not what I said at all."
"You've said you were concerned during the campaign that Obama had anti-American views. You said the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they're pro or anti America," host Alan Colmes said.
"It's an urban legend that was created," she responded. "That isn't what I said at all."
This statistical slipperiness began in the Reagan years, when government-gathered data on a broad range of matters besides unemployment were diluted, rejiggered and sometimes vanished altogether in an effort to keep the public disinformed. Beginning in the Clinton era, however, the BLS began also to report "U6." This broad gauge of unemployment includes everyone out of work and looking, workers who are not looking but would like a job and have sought one in the recent past until they became discouraged, and people who have settled for part-time employment but would work full time if they could find a full-time job.