Atlanta Fed. Chief: Real Unemployment Is More Like 16%

Last month Obama and his fellow liberals were hyping a jobs report which showed a slight decline in the unemployment rate. But as I pointed out at the time, unemployment didn’t go down because people were going back to work. Unemployment went down because so many people have been out of work for so long that they’ve given up actively looking for work and are no longer being counted as “unemployed” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If we keep those people in the picture, the unemployment numbers are a lot worse.

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.
“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.
He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Don’t let any of the wishful thinking from the liberals fool you. There are no “green shoots.” There is only accelerating, run-away government spending feeding into a national debt picture that, while never pretty, is now reaching the point of being merely irresponsible to downright dangerous to our national and economic security.
Our national debate shouldn’t include anything about spending money right now. We have no money. We are bankrupt. The debate right now needs to be about what spending we’re going to cut.