Sept's Unemployment Numbers Even Worse than 1st Thought

First of all, the loss of 263 thousand jobs was far worse than even the most skeptical forecast. Additionally, the Labour Dept may have under counted unemployment up to march of this year, raising the numbers by nearly one million further unemployed.

Bloomberg.com reports,

The Labor Department today also published its preliminary estimate for the annual benchmark revisions to payrolls that will be issued in February. They showed the economy may have lost an additional 824,000 jobs in the 12 months ended March 2009. The data currently show a 4.8 million drop in employment during that time.

The NYTimes reports something similar, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/business/economy/03jobs.html

The endurance of hard times seems likely to increase pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to consider another dose of spending aimed at stimulating the economy, even as the government grapples with deficits projected by some economists to exceed $10 trillion over the next decade.

Despite a $787 billion stimulus package adopted early this year and aimed in part at shoring up state and local coffers, government jobs slipped by 53,000 in September.

“That’s the budget crunch hitting,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “We’re still losing jobs at a very rapid pace. We’re still looking at an economy with a lot of weakness.”

With these bad numbers and October looks to be even worse as very few retailers are hiring seasonal employees for the coming Christmas buying season. Steven Ramires of the Corporatejusticeblog.blogspot.com comments that,

Fourth even those employed are working a record low number of hours. Given the levels of debt in our economy, we must be concerned that continued deterioration in labor income will trigger a second wave of defaults leading to huge financial losses with cascading job losses and plunging GDP. In other words, these levels of unemployment could trigger another vicious downward cycle, perhaps more serious than what we have seen so far.

More importantly, these bad numbers will be spun as a reason for another soaking of our grandchildren. "The economy needs more stimulus" so the Democratically lead Congress will steal from our grandchildren to pay off those constituencies that didn't get enough in the last "stimulus bill."