The Check Is Not in the Mail

One of the issues I've been tracking and sharing with you concerns the strange math that goes into formulating the national unemployment rate. As we have seen over the past year, there have been a few months in which not enough jobs were created to keep up with the population, yet the government reports that the unemployment rate went down!

How can this be?

A clear clue comes from this recent report from the Associated Press.

The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America's unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Since the receipt of such benefits plays a big role in the federal formulation, it is really easy to see how the numbers are being cooked! If you count few, if any, of the growing number of long-term unemployed, it will certainly have a significant impact on the unemployment calculation.

So, the next time the government trots out a figure that appears far rosier than reality, just remember the legion of people who are being left out of the equation altogether.