Good Luck

The Charleston Gazette has a good editorial today calling on state and federal officials to start issuing accurate unemployment figures. The editorial was sparked by a story in the Sunday Gazette-Mail by Reporter Scott Finn about a study by Queens College in New York that found that, while official figures place West Virginia's unemployment at around 5 percent, the truth is about one quarter of the state's working age men are out of work. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the government's unemployment figures don't include jobless people whose benefits have run out, nor people who have stopped looking for work.

By the way, this is not just a problem in West Virginia. Across the US, the states and the federal government ignore huge numbers of unemployed people so they can artificially shrink jobless stats. They then tout the wonderful economy and how many jobs they have created.

Ordinary people call that lying.

The Gazette demands that politicians start issuing accurate numbers. I don't think that's likely to happen. I've got a demand of my own. I want the national media to start pounding on this. Everytime the government releases unemployment figures, I want the journalists reporting them to offer up the true numbers in contrast. I want reporters to point out that the government's numbers are so wildly inaccurate as to be utterly useless. And I want them to point out what the numbers really show, which is that the government's insistence on using fake numbers to prop up failed economic policies is hurting more and more Americans every month.

To be honest, I don't think that's likely to happen either.