Quote:
Originally Posted by Snake Doctor
No number is perfect, not unless they knocked on the door of every home in America each month, and got an honest answer from the person inside.
The number is what the number is, and as long as it's calculated the same way every month then we know if things are getting better or worse.
The last time the unemployment number dropped into the low 4% range and below, (during the Clinton administration) we had mass wage spikes across the country because there was a serious labor shortage.
That alone should tell you that the number is a fairly reliable indicator of how much labor is available in our economy.
Your argument that the statistics are manipulated to say what those in power want it to say is ridiculous. If that were the case, the numbers would be calculated differently depending upon who is in office, and no incumbent would ever lose an election based on the economy.
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so about unemployment numbers:
And of course, on the statistics, people don?t understand the way government statistics work . And most people will concede that politicians lie. They lie to get elected ? everybody knows that ? they say what they have to say, so I don?t know why people assume that once they get elected they stop lying. I mean that?s all they do. Once you get elected your job is to stay in office. And the way politicians stay in office, is to present a rosy scenario. And so what these guys do is they
constantly change the way that economic statistics are calculated so that they can give a better result; so the politicians can point up to these dumbed up statistics as evidence that things have gotten better while they have been in office.
So they constantly change and redefine how things are measured. So the unemployment rate, for example, today, is calculated far differently than it was in the past; if they calculated unemployment during the Great Depression the way we do it now, they would probably have had very little unemployment then either. They calculate GDP differently. There are a lot of things calculated as part of GNP that 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago would not have been counted. Everything has changed, so when they compare a number today to one 20 years ago, it?s completely irrelevant comparisons because they?re not doing it the same way.
And then of course, when you adjust it all for inflation the reality is back in the 1950s a guy had a job, he can support a wife and a large family ? maybe 4 or 5 kids; his wife didn?t have to work; his kids all went to college and none of them had to borrow money; and he saved for his retirement ? and he did all that on a middle-class income and a high school education, if that. Today, you need two paychecks to support a family, both of them need to have gone to college, and they can maybe have one or two kids and that?s it. Beyond that, they can?t even afford it ? and they still have no savings.
With all this booming prosperity how can it be that a middle-class family is so much worse off today than they were in 1950? "
from:
http://www.financialsense.com/transc...2007/0310.html