Shocking Numbers: Real Unemployment Tops 22%

Obama figures deliberately understate economic downturn

Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Red Alert subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users.
Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of "The Late Great USA," a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation's sovereignty.

The true rate of unemployment for October 2009 may be 22.1 percent, not the 10.2 percent reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.

Unemployment at 22.1 percent, if accurate, would be at numbers not seen since peak unemployment during the 1973 to 1975 recession.

Economist John Williams, publisher of ShadowStats.com, estimates that the peak of unemployment in nonfarm unemployment in the Great Depression of the 1930s would, by his methodology, have registered at 34 to 35 percent in 1933.

So, how does the Obama administration get away with reporting the lower unemployment percentage?

Corsi explained that the Clinton administration changed the way BLS calculates unemployment statistics by excluding "discouraged workers," those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be found.

Since the Clinton years, discouraged workers looking for a job for more than one year are not counted as "unemployed" because they are considered to have dropped out of the labor force.
The BLS still includes in "U6 Unemployment" calculations short-term discouraged workers, as long as they have been looking for a job less than one year.

This definition permits the Obama administration to under-report "U3 unemployment" at 10.2 percent when real unemployment as calculated before the Clinton administration redefinition is twice that amount, Red Alert contends, and U6 unemployment lies somewhere in between.

These differences are illustrated in the following chart that Williams produces in the "Alternative Data" section of his website named "Shadow Government Statistics: Analysis Behind and Beyond Government Economic Reporting."

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