Think 9.4% Unemployment is Bad?

Well, it's actually worse than you think.

Take this spin from the AP:

....the pace of layoffs eased, with employers cutting 345,000 jobs, the fewest since September.
The much smaller-than-expected reduction in payroll jobs, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, adds to evidence that the recession is loosening its hold on the country. It marked the fourth straight month that the pace of layoffs slowed.

Faulty logic. If you have a company with 20 employees, and you cut five one month, three the next, and two the following, you have "slowed the pace of layoffs". You have also cut 50% of you staff, which is probably as much as you can while still remaining in business. Thus, the next month, you will be hailed for "no job loss", despite having 50% less employees than four months ago.

And will you ever rehire back to your full staff of 20? And if not, where will those folks go?

That's the problem, folks. A lot more than 9.4% of the public is unemployed right now, and only a slightly sharper look at the numbers will tell you so:

The 9.4 percent May unemployment rate is based on 14.5 million Americans out of work. But that number doesn't include discouraged workers, people who gave up looking for work after four weeks. Add those 792,000 people, and the unemployment rate is 9.8 percent.

-The official rate also doesn't include "marginally attached workers," or people who have looked for work in the past year but stopped searching in the past month because of barriers to employment such as child care, poor health or lack of transportation. Add those 1.4 million people, and the unemployment rate would be 10.6 percent.

-The official rate also doesn't include "involuntary part-time workers," or the 2.2 million people like Noel who took a part-time job because that's all they could get, plus those whose work hours dropped below the full-time level. Once those 9.1 million workers are added to the unemployment mix, the rate would be 16.4 percent.

16.4%, and rising, as job losses are expected to continue until at least mid-2010. And remember, Obama promised us his vaunted Stimulus Plan would prevent this, simultaneously warning us that without it, unemploment could hit 8.9%.

So the 9.4%/16.4% unemployment is already above Obama's pay grade and beyond anything he promised/imagined would happen. What's his next move?

Why, to nationalize health care, to impose a massive cap-and-trade energy tax, give unions complete control of the businesses they work for, and to close down thousands of auto dealerships (adding 10,000+ to the unemployment lines. Well, they're non-union, so what do they count?), especially those in red states.

What happens when unemployment reaches the banana-republic level of 20% or higher? Even then, does Obama rethink his policies amongst the rubble of what was once the engine of the world?

No. He'd destroy us all first, rather than abandon his radical ideology...