Worse Than We Thought

Steve Clemons comes across evidence that the effective unemployment rate, the U-6 figure plus some other numbers, means that we're at 18.7% unemployment.

Here is a June 2009 version of the summary that calculates the Effective Unemployment Rate, which is now 18.70%, and the Effective Number of Unemployed, which is now 30,172,000.

There are currently 14,729,000 officially unemployed workers, as just announced. However, this figure does not include the combined 15,443,000 workers either (1) in the "labor force reserve" because they have abandoned their job searches (i.e., 4,278,000) or (2) underemployed because they are "part-time of necessity" (i.e., 8,989,000) or "otherwise marginally attached" (i.e., 2,176,000).

The effective unemployment rate is therefore 18.70%, instead of the official 9.51%.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of workers who are officially unemployed has increased by 7,188,000, while almost twice as many workers - 13,290,000 - have become effectively unemployed. And all the while, we should have been creating around 2,250,000 new jobs (i.e., 18 months times 125,000 jobs per month) just to keep up with population growth.

In June, the number of workers officially unemployed increased 218,000, while the number of workers effectively unemployed actually decreased 35,000.

The U-6 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics from this morning, is 16.5%. Leo Hindery is arguing that in fact the reality is worse than that, and significantly so. The numbers look to be convincing, but it means that the real problem is that even the government's U-6 numbers are in fact too low.

Thirty million effective unemployed? We're in serious trouble...especially since that number is only expected to go up.

[UPDATE 5:26 PM] As CalcRisk points out:

Employment Dec 1999: 130.53 million
Employment Jun 2009: 131.69 million

A gain of just 1.16 million. What are the odds that the economy loses another 1.16 million jobs over the next 6 months? Pretty high. That would mean no net jobs added to the economy for the naughts: Naught for the Naughts!

In other words, we're basically about to lose every job created over the last decade...and then some.

That is some truly sobering information...and of course, the race to blame Obama for this (after all the last five months clearly are the cause of this, not the eight golden years of the "Bush Boom", snort) is already on.