Paul Craig Roberts: Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

01-10-2011 • InformationClearingHouse.info

The question to ask yourself is: why does the media focus on the unemployment measure that does not count any discouraged workers? The answer is that the U.3 measurement only counts 42% of the unemployed and makes the situation appear to be a lot better than it is. Where are the 103,000 new jobs? As I have reported for years, the jobs are in non-tradable domestic services: waitresses and bar tenders, health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services), and retail and wholesale trade. Today the United States has only 11,670,000 manufacturing jobs, less than 9% of total jobs. Yet, despite America’s heavy dependence on foreign manufactures and foreign creditors, the idiots in Washington think that they are a superpower standing astride the world like a colossus. John Williams reports that “the level of payroll employment still stands below where it was a decade ago, despite the U.S.population growing by more than 10% in the same period. The structural impairments to U.S. economic activity continue to constrain normal commercial activity, preventing any meaningful recovery in business activity.” Another way of saying this is that American corporations have taken American jobs offshore and given them to the Chinese. So much for big business patriotism. Williams also reports that, unless it is finagled, next month’s BLS benchmark revision of payroll employment data will lower the level of previously reported employment by more than 500,000.