The Real Unemployment Rate

If you believe the unemployment rate is 8.3% then you have been fooled, says the latest article by Forbes.

Forbes says the unemployment rate is really 11%. Here is how they come to that conclusion:

* In January 2009, labor force participation rate was 65.7%.
* It was still 65.7% in June 2009 when they said the recession ended.
* The latest rate is 63.7% = 5 million Americans no longer counted.
* If those 5 million are counted, we have 11% unemployment.
* If the January 2012 report had the same participation rate as December 2011, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.7%.

The time has come to begin to raise questions about the precipitous decline in the labor force assumed by Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Are the career bureaucrats there partial to President Obama, and favorable towards promoting his political chances for reelection? Or has the Obama Administration placed someone in a leadership slot over at the BLS or the unemployment statistics branch that is imposing this assumed sharp decline? Because of the oddness of this record setting decline, coinciding with President Obama’s ascension to office, these questions bear further investigation.

Here is the unemployment rate by demographic:

* Blacks: 13.6%
* Hispanics: 10.5%
* Teenagers: 23.2%
* Black Teenagers: 40%

To grade Obama, it is best to see how this "recovery" compares to others.

* Average length of a recession: 10 months, we are now at 50 months.
* Obama boasts about 250,000 jobs created. Reagan routinely created 1 million jobs.
* Can't blame Bush because history shows the steeper the recession, the stronger the recovery.
* After 2.5 years: Reagan created 8 million jobs and unemployment dropped 3.6%


Again, that website is here.

Response to the Entitlement Movement

Good visual response, through a poster, to the Entitlement Movement, otherwise known as the Occupy Movement. You could easily replace the 20 years olds in the World War II picture with 20 year olds serving in Afghanistan and the message would still be the same. But the question begs to be asked: "How are these entitlement babies created?"

Catching Pigs

There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and Install a new communist regime.

In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked: "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said that it was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn.

"When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

"They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.

"The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America.