03.08.13
Stealing wealth
Hey, look what Chinese cyberwarriors did and thank heaven Mandiant told us all about it! Oh, wait ….
Michael Hayden, shoeshining for liberty.
The drop in the unemployment rate is also not as good news as it may initially seem. The Labor Department reported that 130,000 people left the labor force in the month so they are no longer counted as unemployed. The percentage of the adult population that is employed—the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) – was unchanged at 58.6 percent. This is just 0.4 percentage points above the low hit in the summer of 2011 and is unchanged over the last year.
While the unemployment rate has fallen back by 2.3 percentage points from its peak, reversing more than 40 percent of its increase, the EPOP is still down by 4.5 percentage points from its pre-recession level. The drop in unemployment is much more the result of people giving up the search for employment and leaving the labor force than workers finding new jobs …
The other big hit to the economy will be from the sequester, which will pull roughly $80 billion in federal spending out of the economy … While the economy is not likely to fall into a recession and send the unemployment rate soaring, the economy is not growing fast enough to meet the need for jobs from a growing labor force. As a result unemployment will be going in the wrong direction for the rest of the year.
Feel free to explain in comments why our cyberwarriors shouldn’t be included in the cutbacks.