As some of you may know, I’m a bit of a nerd and tend to follow key metrics regarding our economy and its performance. I tend not to follow the big shiny GDP or Stock Market number as they don’t give a great snapshot of how the economy for normal people is actually doing.
Every Thursday the labor department releases weekly job numbers. They’ve been bad since April when everything went to shit because of a global pandemic. Like historically bad with more than 800,000 people a week filing a new unemployment claim.
The numbers had been trending downward the last couple months, it used to be more than one million people a week and had been getting close to 800,000 here the last few weeks.
![Illustration for article titled Your daily dose of crap [Economics]](./wzcpyvumajknct5r6aug.png)
Yesterday though the number was 898,000 people filing a new unemployment claim - shit! That’s moving in the wrong direction.
Another bit if information on the unemployment rate, it only captures people that are unemployed and actively looking for work, the September unemployment rate is 7.9%. This means that the large amount of people that have been furloughed don’t count in the unemployment rate. This doesn’t usually matter as it’s usually a small percentage of folks on unemployment, but not this time.
I just wanted to say that to put this next factoid in perspective. There are over 25,000,000 people on unemployment assistance of some sort this week.
If we take this number and compare it to the number of working age (18-64) adults in the US (206,000,000) we see that 1 in 8 working age Americans are on unemployment assistance of some sort. The number is likely actually higher as I’m not pulling out anyone who’s a primary caregiver, disabled, a student and so on.
These numbers are the worst since the great depression and for fucks sake should motivate our congress and president to quit tripping on their dicks and pass some fucking stimulus to help the vast amount of people hurt by this economic and health crisis!
Thanks for reading my far too boring and depressing lesson on the unemployment numbers and the quirks within it.