On a profoundly regrettable and factual level, it is no longer even close to hyperbole to say that the economy has reached a point where one in five Americans can't make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. I don't see many saying this, but I will: Using the 25% unemployment rate as a benchmark (some will argue Depression-era unemployment was higher than this, others say that's not the case), statistically speaking, we are a few months away from a point where our society's inability to fend for itself will be, at the very least, closing in on numbers that we haven't seen since the Great Depression.
I reference the fact that 20% of our population is unemployed or underemployed, while today's latest Bureau of Labor Statistics' U.3 Index pushes a "cooked" 9.5% figure at us. I also talk about the reality that "everyone's affected."
Here's why.
First of all, the unemployment numbers that you hear being publicized by our government only tell us half the story. As
Meteor Blades notes in his FP story, today:
...The official count - known as U3 and dutifully reported by most of the media - fails to show the true extent of the wreckage. Left out of most reporting is U6, the BLS calculation that includes involuntarily underemployed people. That is, those who want a full-time job, but can only find part-time work. Also missing from U3 are discouraged jobless people who haven't looked for work during the past four weeks. The U6 figure rose in June to 16.5%.
Additionally, one of the President's closest economic advisors, Austan Goolsbie, has noted that roughly 1% to 2% of our population's unemployed are downright unaccounted for on a monthly basis due to a variety of factors.
Exacerbating the realities of our nation's current unemployment situation, rising numbers of our nation's jobless population are simply falling off the charts into what is little more than a woefully insufficient social safety net, as noted in the following Wall Street Journal piece from last week: Numbers On Welfare See Sharp Increase."
Numbers On Welfare See Sharp Increase
By SARA MURRAY
Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2009
...Welfare rolls, which were slow to rise and actually fell in many states early in the recession, now are climbing across the country for the first time since President Bill Clinton signed legislation pledging "to end welfare as we know it" more than a decade ago.
--SNIP--
Twenty-three of the 30 largest states, which account for more than 88% of the nation's total population, see welfare caseloads above year-ago levels, according to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and the National Conference of State Legislatures. As more people run out of unemployment compensation, many are turning to welfare as a stopgap.
The biggest increases are in states with some of the worst jobless rates. Oregon's count was up 27% in May from a year earlier; South Carolina's climbed 23% and California's 10% between March 2009 and March 2008. A few big states that had seen declining welfare caseloads just a few months ago now are seeing increases: New York is up 1.2%, Illinois 3% and Wisconsin 3.9%...
So, your next reaction might be (to the story excerpted, immediately above), 'This is exactly what should happen.' But, as we also learn from this article, that's not the reality.
Unemployment is extended up to a period of 59 weeks in some states. In other states it's as little as 26 weeks. But, the "recession" is now into its 18th month, making it the longest in our nation's history.
As advocates for the poor are now noting, some states, such as Michigan and New Jersey, (where welfare caseloads are actually slightly improved), maintain regulatory environments that inherently obfuscate the suffering. In Michigan, with its 14% unemployment rate and where food stamp use was up 13% over the previous year (equating to 1.4 million people), the state actually requires people to look for nonexistent work, which really does little more than act as a deterrent to people seeking welfare. In New Jersey, if you're a family of three earning more than a paltry $636 per month, you're ineligible!
In short, folks throughout the country are falling through the cracks, bigtime.
And, what was in the first--and only, at least for the near future according to our President--stimulus package in support of our states' welfare programs:
The federal government's fiscal stimulus includes $5 billion for states where more families receive welfare or spending increases on employment subsidies or short-term emergency assistance. That provision sparked concerns from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups that President Barack Obama was undoing the provisions of the 1996 law intended to encourage states to get people off welfare and onto payrolls.
So far, only California and Ohio have received stimulus grants, but 38 other states and territories said they plan to apply, said Jeffrey Kelley, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families.
Some U.S. metropolitan areas are already witnessing Depression-era unemployment. (See: "Jobless rates rise in all U.S. metro areas in May.") Remember, these statistics are based upon the Bureau of Labor Statistics' U.3 Index; double these numbers to get an approximation of actual unemployment and underemployment.)
Jobless rates rise in all U.S. metro areas in May
USA Today
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
June 30, 2009
WASHINGTON -- ...The Labor Department said Tuesday that jobless rates in May rose from a year earlier in all 372 metropolitan areas it tracks.
The unemployment rate in Kokomo, Ind., jumped to 18.8%, up 11.7 percentage points from a year ago, the largest increase of all metro areas. The second-highest increase occurred in Indiana's Elkhart-Goshen, where the rate rose to 17.5%. That's up 11.4 percentage points from a year earlier.
--SNIP--
The other metro areas posting large gains were: Bend, Ore., where the jobless rate rose to 15.2%, an increase of 8.8 percentage points; and North Carolina's Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton saw its unemployment rate rise to 15.4%, a gain of 8.5 percentage points.
--SNIP--
El Centro, Calif., again posted the highest unemployment rate in the country -- 26.8%. Unemployment there is notoriously high because of many seasonal farm workers without jobs. Following behind were: Yuma, Ariz., with a jobless rate of 23.3%; and Kokomo at 18.8%.
As we're told here and in the MSM, 'the situation is getting worse more slowly;' other months--with this past month being one of them--it is glaringly self-evident that we've crossed a threshold that tells us that more immediate stimulus for Main Street is urgently needed.
None is in sight. See: Obama Says Second Fiscal Stimulus Not Yet Needed."
June 23 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said he expects the U.S. unemployment rate will exceed 10 percent this year, though a second stimulus package isn't needed yet.
"I think its important to see how the economy evolves and how effective the first stimulus is," Obama said at a White House news conference.
He said it is "pretty clear" that unemployment will continue rising before the recovery takes hold and said it isn't surprising that initial forecasts from his administration missed the mark.
As Meteor Blades so well illustrates it this morning, government statistics clearly tell us that a near-term "recovery" is not in sight.
As the Federal Reserve's own economic indicators determine it, as long as month-over-month jobs-lost-versus-jobs-created stats are tanking, and as long as hours-worked-per-week statistics bottom-bounce into the lowest numbers ever recorded, we're nowhere near a "recovery" phase; we're still in a "recession." (See: "ECONOMIC INDICATORS:")
EXAMPLES OF COINCIDENT INDICATORS
1. Employees on nonagricultural payrolls: It includes full-time and part-time workers and does not distinguish between permanent and temporary employees. Because the changes in this series reflect the actual net hiring and firing of all but agricultural establishments and the smallest businesses in the nation, it is one of the most closely watched series for gauging the health of the economy...
Now, some would make great hay of the reality that the unemployment rate is not the same as the numbers of those actually employed. That's technically correct. But, that's all accounted for in the lead sentence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Employment Situation Report (i.e.: their "unemployment report"), with today's most recent, monthly report being a good example of that.
Forgetting the charts which--more often than some here would admit--make our qualitative reality more complex than it really is, here's an excerpt from our government's own qualitative commentary on the matter as of today:
Industry Payroll Employment (Establishment Survey Data)
Total nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in June (-467,000). Job losses from April to June averaged 436,000 per month, compared with losses averaging 670,000 per month from November to March. Since the recession began in December 2007, payroll employment has fallen by 6.5 million. In June, job losses continued to be wide- spread across major industry sectors. (See table B-1.)
--SNIP--
The change in total nonfarm employment for April was revised from -504,000 to -519,000, and the change for May was revised from -345,000 to -322,000.
Weekly Hours (Establishment Survey Data)
In June, the average workweek for production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls fell by 0.1 hour to 33.0 hours--the lowest level on record for the series, which began in 1964. The manufacturing workweek rose by 0.1 hour to 39.5 hours, and factory overtime was unchanged at 2.8 hours. (See table B-2.)
The index of aggregate weekly hours of production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls fell by 0.8 percent in June. The manufacturing index declined by 1.2 percent over the month. (See table B-5.)
As even Bonddad has noted in the past, the economy has to create (not lose) 150,000 jobs per month for significant growth to occur.
Lastly, as I note in the headline of this diary, unemployment affects almost everyone. Indeed, unemployment, healthcare and our social welfare all intersect, perhaps much moreso than many would like to admit. It's all right here: "Getting Laid-Off May Lead to Early Death -- But There Are Ways to Cushion the Severe Health Impact of Job Loss."
Getting Laid-Off May Lead to Early Death--But There Are Ways to Cushion the Severe Health Impact of Job Loss
By Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune.com. Posted July 1, 2009.
Studies show that the current economic climate may be eroding months or even years from the lives of those on the bleeding edge of insecurity.
When you lose your job, with no prospect of finding another one quickly, you give up a lot more than income. You are deprived of a sense of security, a source of self-esteem, a certain status in the community. And, according to recent research, you also lose something even more precious: a year or more of your life.
That's the conclusion of two prominent economists, Daniel Sullivan of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Till von Wachter of Columbia University. Matching death records with employment and earnings data of Pennsylvania workers from the 1970s and '80s, they found mortality rates for high-seniority male workers spike sharply in the year following an involuntary job loss, and they remain surprisingly high two decades later.
If this higher death rate persists into old age, it implies "a loss in life expectancy of 1 to 1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40," the researchers report. Or as von Wachter puts it more informally: "We were convincingly able to show that if you lose your job, you die earlier."
But the risk of premature death isn't limited to those who have actually been let go. A growing body of research suggests a nagging, persistent fear of losing one's job is also detrimental to one's health. University of Michigan sociologist Sarah Burgard, who has extensively studied the relationship between job loss, job insecurity and health, calls this "the waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop problem."
The article goes onto tell us about a series of recent studies that provide highly-documented evidence that healthcare, unemployment and our economy are much more closely interrelated than most might think. As the article tells us:
"...If, as many fear, long-term job security is largely a thing of the past, the public health consequences could be enormous.
Unemployment affects virtually everyone.
The well-being of Main Street should be our country's highest priority.
We are not in a recovery as long as net job losses suffocate the well-being of the population as a whole.
Why is there no additional stimulus for Main Street?
Americans' lives are being cut short because of an insufficient response from our government with regard to the devastating economic impact the recession/depression is having upon Main Street.
