I used to live near Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Hot, dry and the desert has a beauty all its own. Yes, I saw tumbling tumbleweeds, rattle snakes and cactuses (cacti). Back then, I lived in a mobile home and when theeconomy callapsed in the early 1990’s, I noticed a cute little trick the government did to make the downturn not look as bad as it really was. They claimed a low unemployment rate which was to make you think that things weren’t as bad as they really were.
Let us make an example to show the trick. Let us take a guy named George, who has a job at Lockheed making $25 per hour on a union job. Let us also say he gets layed-off which adds 1 to the unemployment columb, but his unemployment is only good for 8 weeks.
Situation A: he tries to find work but can’t. His unemployment benefits are exhausted and he is no longer getting unemployment benefits. He is taken off the unemployment numbers. Now, the government does not count him and he ‘no longer counts’. The unemployment numbers are lessened by taking him off the unemployment rolls, but he still is not working and unemployed.
Situation B: he can only find work building camper shells at $15 per hour. He is taken off the unemployment rolls even though he has almost cut his former salary nearly in half. The unemployment count that the government uses does not paint a full picture of the situation, it only counts those actively recieving unemployment benefits and not the number of people unemployed. It will not show, for instance, any and all unemployed people not working that have exhausted their unemployment benefits. So, net time you here the gov’t saying we have low unemployment, that just means there is a low number of people actively recieving benefits. That is what I witnessed when living in the desert just north of Los Angeles. Many people with good union jobs that drove down to the outskirts of LA lost those jobs and some lost their homes and were forced to take whatever jobs that they could making much less that they did. That is a recession. Now, if those people that are no longer recieving benefits AND can’t find a job, too many people in that situation and you are looking at a depression.