CHESSNOID

Forget about focusing on the 10.2% unemployment rate because that doesn’t show the whole picture.  Right now in America our true unemployment rate is at 17.5% if not more.  That figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statisitics (BLS) known as U-6 and represents about 30 million people.

To put those numbers in perspective that represents 1 of every 6 workers in America can NOT find a job.  Forget about reports that 650,000 jobs were created or SAVED because we have a Net loss of over 3 million jobs.  Forget about GDP going up last quarter that economists like to tout which marks the end of the recession, since most of them were wrong about the recession in the first place.  WE  need to know the whole truth if we are to effectively solve the problem at hand.

New York Times:

With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.

In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.

This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

The official jobless rate — 10.2 percent in October, up from 9.8 percent in September — remains lower than the early 1980s peak of 10.8 percent.

The rate is highest today, sometimes 20 percent, in states that had big housing bubbles, like California and Arizona, or that have large manufacturing sectors, like Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

Once we recognize and accept the truth of how bad it really is, we then can focus on real solutions.  The Obama administration’s economic  team completely got it wrong.  The academic financial geniuses  Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein created this report The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestmant Plan but were completely wrong. They claimed with the $787 BILLION dollars spent the maximum unemployment would reach is 8%.  They later claimed there report was wrong because a lack of pertinent information.  How inconvenient!

Regardless, President Obama has surrounded himself with a bunch of eggheads who are all getting it wrong and spending unprecedented amounts trying to figure it out.  Even though Obama and his administration keep going back to the excuse they inherited the bad economy, they have already outspent President Bush and literally have nothing to show for it.  NO RESULTS.

We have record unemployment, record foreclosures, and record deficits.  He might want to scrap the current eggheads Bernanke, Geithner, Romer, and Bernstein and replace them with people who can demonstrate results instead of reports that sound good but are WRONG!  I actually want Obama to succeed for the sake of our country but the speeches and false results will not help.

There are many ideas out there can help.  Just look at this Washington Post article:

It was a strong vow, but it raises a question: Why has a White House that talks so much about boosting employment steered clear of the most direct strategy that could keep Americans on the job?

Since taking office, the Obama administration has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing workers’ private-sector employment or by creating new government-paid jobs. There are programs in a handful of states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours to prevent broader layoffs at their companies — an approach that costs relatively little, since it results in lower payouts of unemployment benefits, and that has helped Germany keep unemployment under 8 percent despite the deep slowdown there. But the Obama administration has so far opted not to expand this initiative. And aside from a small summer employment program for young people, it has not sought to create jobs on the public payroll, something the country did in the 1930s and 1970s.

Instead Obama’s team has taken a more indirect approach, a prudence that critics on the left say is misplaced. If you’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on stimulus, why not do it with conviction? Engaging in more forthright job creation could invite some political pitfalls (such as those constant accusations of socialism), but is double-digit unemployment any less a political risk?

The administration is “scared of [any plans] seeming like old-fashioned make-work, but that’s what it is: You’re giving [people] jobs because they have nothing left to do,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think thank. “Giving people a shot at a job has to be worth a little bad publicity . . . but as in a lot of areas, they proved more cautious.”