12/03/2010

New Fox News piece: What the new job numbers mean

My new piece starts this way:
It's official. The new jobless figures are out and we learned this morning that the nation's unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent last month. -- It has remained at least at 9.5 percent for a record 16 months. Today, reacting to the news, many hosts and analysts on cable news are shocked at the worsening unemployment numbers. But economists have been anticipating the increase for sometime. The depressing problem is that the increase didn't occur for the reason we thought that it would.

Economists thought that the unemployment rate would rise because as some of the Americans who had completely left the labor force began to look again for jobs. Remember, people are only counted as unemployed if they are actively searching for work. But millions of Americans were no longer listed as unemployed over the last couple of years because they simply gave up looking for work.

Unfortunately, the bad news today is that not only is the number of unemployed rising, the number of people who have given up and left the labor force is also still going up. . . .


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