Lonecowboy
Well-known member
About the end of the first week of each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), part of the U.S. Department of Labor, publishes the official monthly unemployment rate for the previous month. The unemployment rate at the beginning of 2008 was 4.9 percent. By August, it had risen to 6.1 percent. At the end of 2008, the unemployment rate stood at 7.2 percent. Since World War II, the annual unemployment rate has ranged from a low of 2.9 percent to a high of 8.5 percent. How does the government determine these figures?
According to the BLS,
Because unemployment insurance records relate only to persons who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to actually count every unemployed person each month, the Government conducts a monthly sample survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. The CPS has been conducted in the United States every month since 1940 when it began as a Work Projects Administration project.
The CPS is a survey with a sample of 60,000 households chosen from 754 geographic areas selected from the grouping of the 3,141 counties and county-equivalent cities in the United States into 1,973 geographic areas. After subdividing each of the 754 areas into enumeration districts of about 300 households, each district is further divided into clusters of four, some of which are then chosen statistically to be interviewed by one of "1,500 highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees" about the employment status of the household. After being interviewed for four consecutive months, the households in the sample are interviewed again a year later in the same four calendar months.
No one is ever asked specifically whether he is unemployed. Instead, interviewers simply ask a series of questions in a prescribed way and record the answers as data in their computers. Those data are all transmitted to a central computer that then classifies the respondents according to their labor-force status.
Just who these people are that are called by the Census Bureau I don’t know. In the 30 years that I have been working, I have never been approached once, and neither has anyone else that I asked about this.
One would think that those who had a job would be classified as employed and those who did not have a job would be classified as unemployed. Such is not the case. Some people who do not even have a regular job are classified as employed. And someone’s being unemployed doesn’t mean that he is entitled to receive unemployment benefits. In fact, according to the BLS, "The unemployment data derived from the household survey in no way depend upon the eligibility for or receipt of unemployment insurance benefits."
One of the prime causes of distorted unemployment figures is the way the government determines who is in the labor force. All active-duty military personnel are excluded from the labor force even though all other employees of the federal government are included. Unpaid family members who work 15 hours or more per week in a family business are considered employed even though they earn no income. But what is so magical about the 15-hour mark? What logical reason could government possibly give for classifying someone as unemployed who regularly works 14 hours a week in a family business but classifying someone as employed who works one additional hour each week? And how can someone be classified as employed if he has no job and earns no income?
"Discouraged workers" without jobs who are not actively looking for work are not counted as part of the labor force. Yet someone who is unemployed but has actively looked for work at least once in the pervious month (which could include simply calling on friends of relatives about a job) is counted. That means that if unemployed workers were reclassified as discouraged workers then unemployment would effectively disappear even though thousands of people would still be unemployed.
Persons without a job who are 16 or 17 and are looking for work are counted as being in the labor force and unemployed even though many companies won’t hire anyone who is under 18. No wonder some economists who don’t work for the government come up with unemployment figures that vary widely from the government’s official figures.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=258
the rest of this article is about unemployment insurance scam-
interesting read but kind of long to post all of it here. LC