It Is Much Worse Than You Are Being Told
For a long time I warned that our economic bubble would burst and that we would plunge into a nightmarish economic collapse. Now it has happened, and it turns out that fear of COVID-19 was the “black swan event” that triggered the collapse. The ironic thing is that COVID-19 is not even close to the worst thing that is going to happen to us. But it was more than enough to topple our incredibly fragile economic system, and now tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering. On Friday, the April jobs report was released, and it was the worst jobs report in U.S. history by a very, very wide margin. According to the official numbers, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs during the month, and the unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent. During the last recession, the unemployment rate peaked at about 10 percent, and we have already left that number in the dust. The figures that we are seeing now are truly, truly horrifying, and what is even more frightening is that they aren’t even that accurate.
But don’t take my word for it.
On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department publicly admitted that the true unemployment rate in April was closer to 20 percent…
Millions of U.S. residents were counted as employed in April despite having no job, suggesting April’s true unemployment rate was closer to 20%, much higher than the official 14.7% reported, the Labor Department said Friday.
The jobless rate should have included people on temporary unpaid leave, furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government said.
I applaud the Labor Department for trying to be honest. In the report, they openly admitted that an “additional 7.5 million workers” should have been classified as unemployed…
But responses to the survey by which the data was collected show 11.5 million people were categorized as employed but absent from work because of vacation, parental leave or other reasons, but including 8.1 million absent for “unspecified” reasons, a group that usually numbers about 620,000.
“One assumption might be that these additional 7.5 million workers …should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff,” a note attached to the government’s jobs report Friday said.