Unemployment Claims Increasing...

Over the past several months the Obama Administration and their enablers in major media have claimed that unemployment has been decreasing.  The opposite is true.  Unemployment claims have been slowly increasing each and every month.

This graph shows a disntinct ocilation is occuring.  While at some point, claims have been decreasing, it swing immediately in the opposite direction and more cliams are filed. 

The data are oscillating about a slowly increasing value, indicating that, if anything, unemployment claims are increasing. That means that for the past 5 1/2 months, every time the administration has told us that the unemployment situation is slowly recovering, and that the data show “the right trend,” they have been absolutely mistaken.


The media has been doing their typical baby duck analysis: every day is a brand new day, every unemployment claims report is the first one they’ve ever seen. So we get headlines like, “job situation improving” when the number of claims drops, and “unexpected increase” when the number rises.

For half a year the claims data has just been oscillating – going nowhere. And nobody seems to have noticed.

For years under the Bush Administration major media harped on a jobless recovery in the short/sharp recession following 9/11...when jobs did recover to the point at which the recession began...major media never seemed to follow up on that point.  When is the MSM going to take a hard look at this and realize that they are flushing what remains of their credibility away?

Unemployment Remains High

The national unemployment rate remains virtually unchanged at 9.7%.  But the important unemployment figure has been almost universally ignored.  That number is the U6 rate which includes pretty much everyone who has actually STOPPED looking for a job.   That's being reported by Yahoo news as,

"...the real unemployment rate, even by the standards of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is much higher. The U-6 unemployment number, as the real data is called, is at 17.5%, within 0.5% of its all-time high. This figure includes discouraged workers who've stopped looking, marginally attached workers, and workers that are forced to work part-time because full-time jobs are not available."

This is still very very high.  I know because I had a hell of a time finding work.  My wife is still working only part-time.  Her wages barely cover health insurance costs.  We're hoping that in the not too distant future, she'll find something full-time.