Jobless stats reveal disparities as economy starts to recover

Published March 09, 2012

| FoxNews.com
While the Labor Department reports a surge in private-sector hiring and the nation's unemployment rate holding steady at 8.3 percent, a closer look at the numbers paints a less flattering picture of the country's post-recession growth.

The latest report for February shows lingering economic disparities among different segments of the population. And, as has been the case for decades, the unemployment rate used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not tell the whole story.

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Counting only those Americans who are actively looking for work, the jobless rate is 8.3 percent, just like it was in January. But counting those who stopped looking for work within the last year, the rate is 9.8 percent.

And counting all of the above, plus those who settled for part-time jobs, the rate is 14.9 percent.

"Everybody who has friends knows it's higher," Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., told Fox News.

Hunter is pushing legislation that would require the Bureau of Labor Statistics to broaden its definition for the unemployment rate. He wants the department to count those who stopped looking for work as well, which would put last month's rate at 9.8 percent.

"We just want to know what the truth is, because we can't make good policy here unless we know what the actual unemployment number is," Hunter told Fox News on Thursday, ahead of the latest labor report release. "It's not 8 percent -- anybody who's out there in the real world knows that. We need real numbers, not D.C. numbers."

The report continues to show subsets like white college grads faring the best in the slow-to-recover economy.

Black workers still face a 14.1 percent jobless rate. The rate for Hispanics is 10.7 percent.

Education level is a huge factor. While those with a bachelor's degree or higher have a 4.2 percent unemployment rate, those with less than a high school diploma are looking at 12.9 percent unemployment.

Youth unemployment, for those between 16 and 19, is 23.8 percent. Black youth unemployment is 34.7 percent.

As a whole, though, the economy showed sustained growth. Employers added 227,000 jobs in February, keeping up one of the best hiring streaks since the recession.

The Obama administration on Friday said the report shows the economy is going in the right direction.

"Today's employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement. "It is critical that we continue the economic policies that are helping us dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the recession that began at the end of 2007, including measures to help the sectors that were most severely harmed by the bubble economy that misdirected investment and created too few durable jobs."


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The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?
By Pallavi Gogoi Posted 12:00PM 07/16/10 Economy, Career

Hundreds of people lined up for a job fair in MiamiRaghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.                                                               http://www.dailyfinance.com/20.....p;