Personally I’m sick of the bullcrap and fake numbers that have come out of Washington for decades. With this latest group it began immediately with the notion of “created or saved” jobs. Then came the trickle-down stimulus bill that trickled into yacht payments and bonuses. So look at these charts.
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
And if you don’t like this, then read another depressing article here.
Some problems with government created “make work” programs are, on the one hand it’s just a scattershot attempt to employ people with no regard for market demand, and on the other you have the Public Choice question of how do the beneficiaries of these programs get chosen? In the first scenario you have a misallocation of resources because the government only cares about providing people with jobs (usually temporary), and doesn’t really care about what those jobs are for. In the second case, you have misallocated resources because it’s the groups with the most political influence who will tend to receive the benefit from the programs.