Lying

The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a “four-year low” of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down? After all, you would think that it should be. The Obama administration has “borrowed” more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to “stimulate” the economy. So have those efforts been successful? Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that “236,000 jobs” were added to the economy in February, but what they didn’t tell you was that the number of Americans “not in the labor force” rose by 296,000. And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down – by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want jobs. Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis. For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this “economic recovery” that they keep talking about?

At this point, the “unemployment rate” has become so meaningless that it really isn’t even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.

As Wikipedia tells us, many economists consider the employment-population ratio to be far superior to other measurements of employment…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rate as the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economist’s favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, “The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions.” This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.

A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below…

As you can see, the percentage of Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to below 59 percent during the last economic crisis. Since that time, it has not risen back above 59 percent. This is the first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment rate bounce back following a recession. At this point, the employment-population ratio has been below 59 percent for 42 months in a row.

Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery. The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago. Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around.

Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008 is posted below…

2008-01-01 62.9
2008-02-01 62.8
2008-03-01 62.7
2008-04-01 62.7
2008-05-01 62.5
2008-06-01 62.4
2008-07-01 62.2
2008-08-01 62.0
2008-09-01 61.9
2008-10-01 61.7
2008-11-01 61.4
2008-12-01 61.0
2009-01-01 60.6
2009-02-01 60.3
2009-03-01 59.9
2009-04-01 59.8
2009-05-01 59.6
2009-06-01 59.4
2009-07-01 59.3
2009-08-01 59.1
2009-09-01 58.7
2009-10-01 58.5
2009-11-01 58.6
2009-12-01 58.3
2010-01-01 58.5
2010-02-01 58.5
2010-03-01 58.5
2010-04-01 58.7
2010-05-01 58.6
2010-06-01 58.5
2010-07-01 58.5
2010-08-01 58.5
2010-09-01 58.5
2010-10-01 58.3
2010-11-01 58.2
2010-12-01 58.3
2011-01-01 58.3
2011-02-01 58.4
2011-03-01 58.4
2011-04-01 58.4
2011-05-01 58.4
2011-06-01 58.2
2011-07-01 58.2
2011-08-01 58.3
2011-09-01 58.4
2011-10-01 58.4
2011-11-01 58.5
2011-12-01 58.6
2012-01-01 58.5
2012-02-01 58.6
2012-03-01 58.5
2012-04-01 58.5
2012-05-01 58.6
2012-06-01 58.6
2012-07-01 58.5
2012-08-01 58.4
2012-09-01 58.7
2012-10-01 58.7
2012-11-01 58.7
2012-12-01 58.6
2013-01-01 58.6
2013-02-01 58.6

So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better?

Anyone that wants to claim that “unemployment is going down” should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent. Otherwise they just look foolish.

Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now. But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.

Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing. Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.

Just consider these numbers…

-The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year.

-The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.

-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.

-Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.

No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine.

If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February?

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy. Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in.

Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.

So did we learn our lesson?

No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described…

Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again.

But it hasn’t even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance.

Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of – and forgive me the alphabet soup here – CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories.

In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products.

At some point, we will have another derivatives crisis even worse than the last one.

When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again.

But as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis.

So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want. Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching.

I hope that you are getting ready.

Guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans are both lying to us again. So what else is new? The truth is that the great “budget crisis” which supposedly took us to the verge of a government shutdown was just a whole bunch of political theater. Even the Associated Press is declaring that our politicians used “accounting sleight of hand” to reach the $38.5 billion budget cut figure. Not that $38.5 billion was an impressive number to begin with. $38.5 billion would just be one percent of the federal budget. But once you strip away the accounting charades, the real budget cut number is somewhere around 14 billion dollars. It turns out that the “budget cuts” include money left unspent from previous years, earmarks that were going nowhere, unused census money and programs that Obama was already planning to cut. The more you examine the “budget deal”, the more it becomes obvious that the Republicans and the Democrats had no intention of doing anything serious about our debt problems. The U.S. government is still going to run a record-setting budget deficit in 2011 and both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame.

So should we be surprised that our politicians have been lying to us again?

Of course not.

But if something is not done about our soaring debt it is absolutely going to crash our financial system.

According to the IMF, the U.S. government will have to borrow an amount of money equivalent to 29 percent of GDP this year alone in order to finance its budget deficit and its maturing debt.

That is what you call a crisis.

But neither political party seems the least bit serious about the national debt.

The Republicans are proposing even more tax cuts without saying how they are going to pay for them, and they even tucked an increase in military spending into the “budget cut” deal.

The Democrats don’t seem to want to cut much of anything. In fact, most Democrats seem to believe that government debt is not much of a crisis at all.

Our politicians love to talk about “cutting the budget”, but nothing ever gets done. Both parties have been promising us “fiscal responsibility” for decades but both parties have never delivered.

Sadly, the American people have not held our politicians responsible for this.

This latest episode just reveals how much of a joke Washington D.C. has become. In the 8 days leading up to the “historic” $38.5 billion budget deal, the U.S. national debt increased by $54.1 billion dollars.

Our politicians are standing by and doing nothing while the financial future of this nation is being destroyed right in front of our eyes. It is now being projected that by the year 2021, interest payments on the national debt will amount to $1.1 trillion dollars a year.

Fortunately, some bloggers out there are starting to wake up to just how pathetic this latest “budget deal” really was.

For instance, Tim Fernholz of the National Journal recently posted the following….

For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds, and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion.

In fact, some conservative bloggers are becoming absolutely furious with the duplicity of the Republican party. In a recent article on Business Insider, John Ellis really let John Boehner have it….

It turns out that the budget agreement that all parties were hailing this past weekend as a “great achievement” is in fact a joke. Any Republican who was elected with even a sliver of Tea Party support is now duty-bound to vote against it on Friday. Every 2012 Republican presidential hopeful is now duty-bound to demand that it be voted down.

But Boehner is already saying that it is time to “move on” and that he is really going to “get tough” during the next battle. Boehner is claiming that the “war” over the debt ceiling is going to be about “trillions” instead of “billions”.

The American people are certainly in the mood for something to be done about our debt crisis. According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, the vast majority of Republicans and the vast majority of independents do not want the debt ceiling raised. Even Democrats are roughly split on the issue.

John Boehner is promising that the Republicans will not agree to raise the debt ceiling without “serious steps in the right direction”.

So what pathetically low number will cause John Boehner to cave in this time?

Obama is already taking a strong stand on the debt ceiling. He is demanding that the Republicans send him a “clean bill” and is warning that they must not “play politics” with U.S. government finances.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney stated that “the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling would be Armageddon-like in terms of the economy.”

You know what? To a certain degree Carney is right. If the U.S. government hits the debt ceiling the financial markets will likely go haywire. That would cause the big boys up on Wall Street to start putting tremendous pressure on Boehner. There is no way that Boehner would watch chaos unfold on Wall Street and not end up flinching.

Not that Boehner was ever serious about cutting the federal deficit. He was not serious about it during the Bush years and he is not serious about it now.

This is all just a whole lot of political theater.

Meanwhile, most Americans are not even paying attention to all of the financial fraud being committed by the “fourth branch of government”.

Of course the Federal Reserve is not actually part of the federal government at all. But they do get to spend trillions and lend trillions without ever having to get the approval of Congress, the president or the American people.

For example, most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has been handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in nearly risk-free loans to their friends and even to the wives of their friends.

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve is above the law and is not accountable to anyone. In fact, we can’t even get our politicians to authorize a comprehensive audit of their books.

The truth is that our system is soaked in so much fraud that there is no way that it will ever recover.

We have turned our backs on the principles of our founding fathers and so now we pay the price.

The U.S. national debt is now over 14 times larger than it was 30 years ago and it is currently rising by well over 4 billion dollars every single day. This debt will destroy our financial system. We are stealing the future from our children and our grandchildren.

It is so sad to see what is happening to America.

So what do all of you think about what is going on in Washington D.C.? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….

The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment

Political Theater: It Turns Out That The Republicans And The Democrats Were Both Lying To Us And That The Real Budget Cut Number Is Far Less Than $38.5 Billion