Real Unemployment Rate 16.8%

The nation's "official" jobless rate hit 9.7 percent at the end of August.

Inside the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is another number: total jobless. It includes all those who are out of work and who have been removed from the labor force by government statistical rules. Adding those in you get an even grimmer number, and one that compares quite closely to the numbers of the Great Depression.

That number is 16.8 percent.

Ol' George in east Texas does a pretty good job of number crunching these government reports. He points out if it were not for the creativity of the good people in Washington, D.C., the numbers would look even worse.

No, he's not talking about the Stimulus Projects jobs that Joe Biden hallucinates.

He's talking about the fact that since January 1 the government has "invented" one million new jobs simply by "estimating" them into existence.

This is the 'statistically made up because we think so" department. Hmmm, lemme see here: 15,000 new jobs in construction...sure, whatever... 26,000 in professional services, and 24,000 leisure and hospitality. Uh huh. In all, 673,000 new jobs have been 'estimated into existence' since January and if you back out January, it's more than a million jobs that have been 'estimated into existence' so far this year.

No fair reaching for a swig of Jack Daniels - too early for that. It's only a 26-year high for unemployment.

No one knows for sure if these new jobs exist because there is no paperwork to prove they are there. On the other hand, no one can prove they aren't, so I guess it's your gut logic against their pipe dream.

This paragraph from today's report tells you all you need to know about the phoney-baloney unemployment numbers:

About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August, reflecting an increase of 630,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Did you get all that? "Marginally attached" means jobless, but officially not unemployed because they hadn't tried to look for work in the past four weeks.

You gotta keep knocking on doors and telling Uncle Sam about it or he'll just assume you're as happy as a clam, and no one need worry about you.