Unemployment Not As Good As It Seems

Today the Census Bureau released the unemployment report for February. The result was quite pleasing at a first glance. Unemployment for last month remained steady at 9.7%. Every field except construction has been adding or remained level at jobs.

Yet while it is tempting to rejoice over this and the fact that only 36,000 jobs were shed last month the actual unemployment rate is much worse. in the last two months 250,000 people left the workforce completely. So the fact that 64,000 jobs were lost in the last two months is widely inaccurate. When you factor in the people who left the workforce, in the last two months we have lost 310,000 jobs. The president thus still has a lot of work to do in order to 'fix' our economy.

In fact the most likely reason unemployment stayed the same this month is due to the large number of people who became 'discouraged workers' (left the workforce.)

In short, despite the report from the Census Bureau today, unemployment is still a major problem and is not getting much better.