Reply #18: Unemployment benefits have nothing, nada, zip to do with how the unemployed are counted. [View All]

The US Census does a monthly survey, sampling from the population.

It is explained here at the BLS site: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#unemployed

At the "Unemployment" paragraph their explanation begins...

"Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following..."

Note that there are no questions about receiving benefits, and the calls are not selected based on who is or is not getting benefits.

Major areas of questioning are listed.

Whether one believes the survey is accurate or not is certainly a valid question, (though no one has definitively proved otherwise - except for a few blogs that know more than anyone else but have no real evidence, like a census-sized survey) but it has nothing to do with who is or is not getting unemployment.
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That is a separate discussion from the lack of unemployment benefits. Those benefits were intended to provide a backstop between jobs, not replace them. But 99 weeks (some states limit them to as little as 42, I believe) is nearly two years, and for some they were extended.

At this point, and considering that we are unlikely to return to anything near the 5% or 6% unemployment we had just a few years ago until AT LEAST 2020 or so, benefits have now become a replacement for working. Not intentionally, because MOST people really would rather work, but there are no real alternatives.

That's a real problem, because it just adds to our state "debt". Those benefits are paid by the state, and states borrow the money from the Feds to do this when their revenues are not sufficient. Now, however, states are running into the red, so that is no longer, really, a viable option.

Until, and unless an entity with enough of a bankroll invests in our people again, in our infrastructure, but most importantly in the research and development (which is being cut) and, in higher education (which is becoming unaffordable for large numbers of people) and in creating whatever jobs will carry us into the next century, the person who threw the McDonalds applications down on the OWS rally was exactly correct. (An asshole, but correct). Minimum wage jobs are the absolute fastest-growing of all jobs, and part-time minimum wage jobs are the fastest-growing of all. (Check the job report from Friday - we not only didn't create enough jobs to provide just for those that are entering the work force (about 127K a month needed) but we didn't create enough to take any of the unemployed out of the workforce, and a chunk of the jobs that were created were part-time.

Millions of people who were making 40-80,000 a year now make 14, 20, 27,000, while housing prices have declined, (more to come, btw), food prices have inflated by about 4 1/2%, energy costs have not gone down appreciably, up in some cases - in other words, it is still very nearly as expensive to live in 2011 as it was in 2008, yet pay for many has dropped to less than half of what they were making, or to none.

We cannot fix that by paying unemployment benefits for 10 or 20 years, and the people will not be better off if we try to substitute that for the real fixes we have to pursue.