Jobs, Jobs, And More Jobs

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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This post is about jobs.

You might have guessed that from the title.

Not the late Steve, the other kind.

During the past months America has been creating approximately 200,000 jobs. At least that’s what the official figures are saying. It has helped to indicate the underlying strength of the economy, led to official unemployment figures of 5.5% and propped up the USD on the foreign exchange markets.

And no one is questioning any of it.

It’s as if it’s really real.

Again it’s all a question of what you do with the numbers.

The May 2015 figure for the labor force is 157.5 million. That is the figure the government uses to calculate it’s unemployment rate of 5.5%.

That’s what they call the ‘U3’ number. U3 is the official unemployment rate.

But there is also a ‘U5’ number that includes discouraged workers and all other marginally attached workers; and a ‘U6’ number that adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons.

Don’t ask me what happened to ‘U1’ or ‘U4’ because I don’t know. However ‘U2’ is a very successful pop group from Dublin, Ireland.

The problem is that the “official” unemployment rate (U3) does not count discouraged workers who have settled for part-time jobs or have given up looking altogether because they believe there are no jobs out there for them.

There are about another 7.5 million or so people who were not considered ‘unemployed’ because they were employed part-time for economic reasons. Those people are also called involuntary part-time workers – working part-time because their hours were cut back or because they were unable to secure a full-time job.

If you include those individuals, (the U6 number), you get a very different figure for the nation’s unemployment rate. Unlike other jobs figures, the U6 rate actually got worse in June.

So the real unemployment rate is well in excess of 12%, more than double the official figure.

But it is even worse than that.

The economy is growing, BUT it is growing slowly, and it is growing from a very low base caused by the financial crisis that the banksters brought upon us with their fraud and greed.

In that light, an increase of 200,000 jobs or so each month is basically just replacing some of the millions of jobs lost during the bank-caused recession, not creating ‘new’ jobs as such. In other words we’re just slowly getting back to where we were.

The forecasts aren’t optimistic either. If and when the workers laid off during the recent recession find new jobs and we get to what the government calls full employment, the labor force is forecast to grow at a rate of only 0.5% for the rest of this decade. At 0.5%, we grow at a rate of about 66,000 a month — nowhere near 200,000. Next decade it’s even worse, at 0.2%.

Add to that the fact that a great number of the jobs being created are government bureaucratic jobs that cost the country money, not real jobs that produce wealth for the country and you can see that there is little for the politicians to crow about.

As I noted in my post on Wednesday, with statistics you can ‘prove’ anything. Take any government figures with a great big pinch of salt.

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The Final Fabulous Fasab Fact Day – For April, That Is!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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April is drawing to a close, but not before another selection of fabulous fasab facts.

Here’s the latest random bunch to improve your knowledge.

Hope you enjoy.

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There are more possible iterations of a game of chess

than there are atoms in the known universe.

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Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs sacrificed money

and stayed in college four extra years

instead of going directly to the NBA

because in her last days his dying mother made

him promise to graduate college with a degree.

(Good on you Tim!)

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England’s King George I

was actually German.

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A study conducted by Swiss University

showed that stockbrokers

are more reckless and manipulative

than diagnosed psychopaths.

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In his youth, Andrew Johnson apprenticed as a tailor.

Even as president, he never stopped making his own suits.

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There is a point in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert

where rain has never been recorded.

Scientists call this region “absolute desert”.

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Lord Byron kept a pet bear

in his college dorm room.

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If you eat a polar bear liver, you will die.

Humans can’t handle that much vitamin A.

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Dead people can get goosebumps.

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Kim Jong Il wrote six operas.

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Our eyes are always the same size from birth,

but our nose and ears never stop growing.

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The top layer of a wedding cake,

known as the groom’s cake,

traditionally is a fruit cake.

That way it will save until the first anniversary.

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Princeton researchers successfully turned a live cat

into a functioning telephone in 1929.

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The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2,

should always be written as QE2.

QEII is the actual Queen.

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If you do not have a child,

you will be the first in your direct lineage,

all the way back to beginnings of human history,

to do so (or not, as the case may be!)

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Did You Know? More Random Facts From Fasab’s Files

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Another chance to increase your knowledge with a very random list of facts from fasab’s files.

Have some fun throwing one or two of these into conversations. It will either make you the hit of the party, or you won’t be asked back. Possibly a win-win scenario!

As always, enjoy.

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“I” is the most spoken word in the English language

 

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“You” is the second most spoken English word

 

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An Olympic gold medal must contain 92.5 percent silver

 

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Lee Harvey Oswald’s cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992.

 

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The average American works 24,000 hours in their lifetime

just to pay their taxes

 

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A quarter of Russia is covered by forest.

 

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A rodents teeth never stop growing.

They are worn down by the animal’s constant gnawing

on bark, leaves, and vegetables.

 

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About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians

died by the time they were thirty.

 

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A Walla Walla scene

is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background

when they say walla walla it looks like they are actually talking.

 

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Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans

because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.

 

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Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952.

 

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Alexander the Great was an epileptic.

(He’d have a fit if he knew I’d told you that!)

 

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In eighteenth century English gambling dens,

there was an employee whose only job

was to swallow the dice if there was a police raid.

 

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In England, in the 1800’s pants was considered a dirty word.

 

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In the movie “Star Trek: First Contact”,

when Picard shows Lilly she is orbiting Earth,

Australia and Papa New Guinea are clearly visible

.. But New Zealand is missing.

 

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Irving Berlin, who was born on 11 May 1888

and who composed three thousand songs in his lifetime,

couldn’t read music.

 

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It is estimated that millions of trees in the world

are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts

and then forget where they hid them.

 

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Jacques Cousteau invented scuba gear

while in the French resistance during World War II

 

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The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street

were named after Bert the cop and Ernie

the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

 

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A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champange

will bounce up and down continually from the bottom of the glass to the top.

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