Gallup CEO: "America's 5.6% Unemployment Is One Big Lie"

a reply to: Aazadan

That's when you get balsy and do some real journalism and record the conversation so we can get this bull# out in the open.

a reply to: onequestion

I thought about it, I probably should have. Hearing someone admit to the unemployment rate was interesting, but more than that was the Walmart issue. I hadn't really thought about that aspect of things. When most people are unemployed, one company who employs a large chunk of whats remaining gets massive political power. Even more so, Walmart is very anti competitive with their products and will sell items at a loss just to make sure no one else can sell them. That means they're preventing new businesses from forming and reducing their political power.

But, how can the town fight back? They can't take away even more jobs.

a reply to: Aazadan

Well, it takes more than 1 town to fight back when it comes to corporations like Wal-Mart and Home Depot.

It requires a cordinated effort of people not willing to work and people not willing to purchase goods from these places.

It means that people will have to spend more money when they are getting construction done on their house so that the contractors can use local vendors in order to purchase the materials required to get the job done.

It will never happen because of capitalism itself. Its its own worst enemy.

a reply to: onequestion

My town has no ability to fight back. As I learned, Walmart has not just put everyone out of business but they have enough political leverage that they can now force the town to not bring in new business. When they supply most of the jobs, it's in their interest to keep unemployment high so that labor rates are depressed. If those in power in town try to fight this, Walmart can simply cut jobs and make the unemployment situation even worse.

strange that this info comes out at the very time that Obama is going to present Congress a revision in the 401k tax code.. He is going to propose that the 10% penalty for any early withdrawl's be suspended....

in-other-words... the pizz-poor Americans, in the midst of a robust 'rebounding Economy'...are in need of cash to survive
because many of the earlier programs are exhausted and the poor are getting poorer, with an ever contracting work force needed to keep the economic conveyor belt cranking for the ever dwindling group of those well off enough to sustain themselves---

i.e.: the selected subset of fat cats & federal employees and big money contributer's to the Democrat party (also exempted from the mandatory ObamaCare)






hey Aazadan ... have you read my signature line yet ?

originally posted by: poncho1982
This isn't telling me anything new.



I've been unemployed since 9/2014. I looked and looked and looked, and got ZERO calls back on all my applications. I gave up, and am currently freelancing to get by.



I honestly don't know what more a guy can do to find a job. I have an excellent work history, great attendance, and I stay at my jobs for a long time. (since I was 18, the shortest job I had was for 2 years, and that was my last job. I usually stay minimum of 5 years) I have management experience, and tech experience (I'm an electronics repair technician) But they want to pay $9-10 an hour today for jobs that I used to get $18 an hour for. I make more than $10 an hour on my own so you begin to think why work for someone else?



It's really rough out there. I want to move because I feel like I've tapped out the local job market, but I guess it would be the same everywhere.



I find it hard to believe the official numbers. I've been out there in the trenches, I know better.

I feel for you. My brother got dumped into a pool of the unemployed by IBM back in October. He still hasn't found a job. A big problem is that he's over 55, even though he has tons of experience and is a dependable employee. Now all his co-workers have gotten RA'd (another word for laid off) by IBM, most of them older employees.

This 5.6% unemployment figure is a total farce!

Foreclosures are trending up again:

investmentresearchdynamics.com...

This is how the government gets their "jobs" data. It is, the definition of BS. No mechanism exists to poll the entire legal and illegal population of the united states.

The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of more than 410,000 business establishments called Current Employment
Statistics, and one called the Current Population Survey, which questions 60,000 householders each month. It is always calculated on a seasonally adjusted basis determined by a frequently tweaked formula.

The BLS report only provides a snapshot of what's happening at a single point in time.
It's important to understand that the jobs-created-last-month-numbers that it reports are not "real." Not because of a conspiracy,
but because statisticians apply formulas to the raw data, estimate the number of jobs created by the "birth" and "death" of
businesses, and use other filters to fine-tune the numbers.

The BLS tells you it is not a real number, its based on a formula they use. Who gets to choose which 60k households get asked questions? Or which business's?....

originally posted by: R3KR
The BLS tells you it is not a real number, its based on a formula they use. Who gets to choose which 60k households get asked questions? Or which business's?....

You should look into the concept of random sampling. You're right that the BLS numbers aren't real but you completely missed the reason why. Unemployment numbers only count those recently laid off that are still looking for work. Long term unemployed (>6 months) aren't counted in the numbers. Which means when you lose your job, and no work has come along to replace it a few months later, you stop being counted as unemployed.