A PERMANENT 30% UNEMPLOYMENT
RATE FOR THE UNITED STATES

As we have indicated over and over again on the pages of this website, the U.S. government is very deliberately understating the REAL unemployment rate for the country. In July, the government announced that the U.S. unemployment rate in the United States was 9.5%.

But that, of course, is a conscious and very purposeful obfuscation of the facts that politicos - both Democrats and Republicans - have used to cloud the issue of unemployment in the United States. The report used by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) showing a 9.5% rate of unemployment is generated from a report known as "U3."

However, Barry Ritholtz, the CEO and Director for Equity Research for Fusion IQ, says that using the "U3" to report on the nation's unemployment rate is a very deceptive contrivance; he writes:

"It's been pretty obvious for sometime that the Financial Media are doing a disservice to their readers by only reporting U3, GIVEN HOW DRAMATICALLY IT UNDERSTATES UNEMPLOYMENT. Indeed, consumer sentiment reports are at deep negative levels that only occur when unemployment is much more than what U3 has been saying. It is painfully obvious that U3 does not paint an accurate view of the employment situation."

Using the more accurate "U6 Report" from the BLS, the U.S. has an unemployment rate today of 16.5% rather than 9.5%.

NOTE:  The Bureau of Labor Statistics' "U6 Report" includes ALL workers who indicate that they want and are available for a job, unlike the more commonly used "U3 Report" which does not count workers who have been unemployed longer than 6-9 months (and, therefore, are no longer drawing unemployment benefits), workers who are employed part-time while looking for full-time work, workers who are doing volunteer work while waiting for full-time work, etc.

In addition, if one includes workers the government doesn't even count - such as unemployed farm workers (not counting illegal immigrants), the self-employed who are unable to find work, and workers in private homes - the unemployment rate approaches an astonishing 23.4%.

In other words, unemployment has insidiously spread to almost one-fourth of the U.S. work force, and could very well reach 30% - a number much larger than the single-digit figure of 9.5% commonly bandied about in the press. What makes this particularly disturbing is that this rate of unemployment may be something that is PERMANENT.

Think about that: a permanent unemployment rate of 30%. That is called STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT; it is UNEMPLOYMENT THAT PERSISTS EVEN WHEN ECONOMIC GROWTH IS STRONG. It is long-term and chronic; it arises from an imbalance (even in good times) between the number of workers available for work - say 100 workers - and the actual need of employers for workers - say 70. In other words, it is unemployment that is permanently "built into" the system.

Ritholtz says that a 30% rate of structural unemployment in the United States will soon be reached, and will persist even when (or if) the economy recovers - and it may not!

NOTE: The current rise in the stock market is what most economists are calling a "Bear Market Rally." [A bear market is when stock prices fall; a bull market is when stock prices rise.] A "Bear Market Rally" is an uptick in the market during a bear market; the most famous "Bear Market Rally" in history followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929: After slowly regaining nearly 50% of its losses from the crash in 1929 (which erased 89% of the market's value), a longer bear market began and lasted from 1937 to 1942 when World War II brought an end to the Great Depression.

Ritholtz goes on to say that this level of structural unemployment (30%) is the result of a drive by the business elites over the past few decades to achieve greater and greater profits by shipping U.S. jobs overseas and pocketing the difference between what they would have paid U.S. workers as opposed to the much lower wages they are now paying foreign labor - and that includes high-paying "white-collar" as well as "blue-collar" jobs.

In the farming sector, an even higher rate of structural unemployment has been reached by driving out "family farms" and replacing them with corporate "plantation farms" that utilize massive numbers of "illegal" immigrants.

Ritholtz says that the elites have been able to hide what's been happening by -

"... failing to mention that unemployment has gone down (not now, but in the past - for example, during the Clinton years and the early years of the Bush Administration) primarily due to people LEAVING the labor pool - not due to a surge of new job creation."

And when Ritholtz says that people have been leaving the "labor pool," he does not mean that they have been leaving the "labor pool" voluntarily, but they have been leaving the "labor pool" because they have been "kicked out" of it (as it were) and treated by the elites and the mass media as if they no longer exist.

Sadly, THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT IS GOING TO CHANGE; IT IS SOMETHING WRITTEN IN STONE and prophesied by the Bible in the words of a mysterious rhyme uttered by the rider of the Black Horse of the Apocalypse:

"A measure of wheat for a penny [literally - denarius, a Greek coin which represented a WHOLE DAY'S wages], and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine." (Revelation 6:6)

The meaning of this is that the condition of man during in the "Last Days" will be reduced to such that he will have to labor (if he can find work at all) a whole day simply to buy a loaf of bread or three measures of barley. But the second part of the saying ["... and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine ..."] means that the famine in these days will not extend to what might be called a "global elite of worthies" who have evidently allied themselves to the anti-Christ's policy of conquest - only the rich in the ancient world could afford oil and wine.