Courtesy of Dr. Paul Price of Beating Buffett
Our leaders seem to care only about getting reelected rather than addressing the dire needs of our nation. It takes about 150,000 newly created jobs to simply absorb the latest batch of first time entrants into the job market. The latest jobs data showed only 36,000 new positions yet claimed that the unemployment rate droppedfrom 9.4% to 9.0%. You don’t need an MIT degree to see this does not compute.
To obscure the truth, Washington D.C. has changed the rules on how they account for this rate. Presto, a big drop in unemployment even though more people entered the work force than the number of new jobs created. The chart below tells the true story. The percentage of America’s population that is actively employed has fallen to levels almost never seen. It’s worse now than it’s been in decades.
The official inflation rate numbers are similarly massaged to show low inflation even as everyday Americans see their living costs escalate dramatically. Pretending that inflation is low keeps debt service on our $14 trillion national obligation low. It also made for no raises in Social Security payments in either 2010 or 2011. Cost of living adjustments on pensions and other major government expenses are also keyed to the official inflation proclaimations. Political leaders have every incentive to undereport the real rate. ShadowStats shows the numbers in the chart below as they would have looked under the 1990 calculation rules. They’d look even more shocking if we were actually comparing apples to apples with the way inflation was figured in 1980’s when the reported rate was well into the 10% – 18% annualized range.
