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A Wealth of Joblessness

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Did you know that the unemployment rate — as high as it is — is actually very much understated? It doesn’t include those who are out of work but have given up trying to find a job.

This puzzles me.

Oh, I see the rationale for not counting those who have abandoned their job searches (the information gets harder to collect and maintain, and you enter into the farther regions of statistics), but, nevertheless, they certainly do remain unemployed.

What puzzles me is the ability to remain permanently jobless. I don’t think my wife would let me make that choice. And even if she did, without income where would we get the money to pay the mortgage or buy food?

There’s unemployment insurance, which helps tide folks over when they lose a job. Yet, a condition for receiving unemployment benefits is continuing to actively seek a new job.

Like many, we could fall back on family and friends. But I’d feel bad enough about that if I was pounding the pavement every day in search of gainful employment. I can’t imagine doing so without any intention of landing a position and getting back on my own two feet.

So what can we conclude about folks who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one? There are apparently a lot of rich folks out of work.

This yields the unwelcome-to-many conclusion that, in America, everyone is rich. Inequality notwithstanding.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

10 replies on “A Wealth of Joblessness”

Everyone IS rich, if you live in America. Class warfare is a game used by liberals to gin up support. I really don’t know how such a negative campaign has been able to work for so lang. A lot of people don’t realize that if others can spend their Welfare checks on a cruise ship or in Las Vegas, that there actually is NO poverty in this country. Once they think about that, will they then contemplate HOW this can be? And, if they come up with a truthful response (EVIL Capitalism), will they defend it?

In my neighborhood people were laid off from $40 per hour jobs to be replaced by $10 illegals.
So breadwinner had to take TWO jobs that still don’t cover his lost $40. So wife who had a parttime job now takes a full time job. Three teenagers in highschool and college had to take fulltime jobs.
So we lost 1 job but gained 7!!!!!
So much for government figures.

In CA many can go on disability after their unemployment runs out. There are now more “handymen” around, working for cash, than there were before. If Sharon Stark knows that illegals were hired to replace her husband, she should call ICE. Finding the best use of capital, lower priced labor, is Capitalism at its best. Sharon Stark, meet, Dagney.

i have been in construction for 33 years and for the life of me i cannot get a real job anymore, construction is so bad in so. cal and the illegals so plentiful it is dismal,my wife’s job closed down and she took her s.s. early just so we would have a little more income. i spent my savings and my 401 so i work jobs that are few and far between. it’s only by God’s grace that we have a place to live. living like this is not by choice but forced on me, and for what? down but not out…

Since America has a Democrat President, the statistic that is touted in the media is the U3. The REAL unemployment figure (i.e., the figure that any actual rational human being would recognize as being “unemployed people”) is the U6. While the U3 is officially (as of today) 9.6%, the U6 is closer to 22% – haven’t looked lately.

And the answer to the author’s question is that there A LOT of former-100K execs who are delivering pizza. And the phenomenon described by poster #2 above would be part of the U6, she is completely correct that they are omitted from the U3.

They aren’t rich.

Many of the long-term unemployed were one half of a two-income family. These people want to work but need a local job that pays enough to more than cover the additional costs (increased payroll and income taxes, child care, second car with increased insurance and maintenance, work clothes, etc.). A low-paying job would be worse than worthless for these people. A medium-paying job might only net a few dollars an hour after the additional costs are subtracted. Is it worth putting the kids in day care, commuting every day, falling behind on housework, etc. for $100-$200 a week? Most people say “No,” and therefore remain unemployed. Should they still be counted as unemployed? Absolutely.

And then there are those who DO live with their parents. We went from a family for two to a family of seven in a year and a half. Our daughter has a job caring for a lady for $240 a week and goes to college in the evenings. That leave grandma with the young elementry kids, homework and bedtime stuff. I am lucky they are cute sweet children and don’t fight me about homework.

I think the ones who have “given up” are really the ones whose benefits have run out and no longer report their job-searching efforts to government agencies.

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