In this video, Ethan discusses the latest unemployment report from the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), dated December 5, 2014.
The headlines in media and pundits all over were touting the huge success of this report with a number of 321,000 new jobs. While getting Americans working in full-time jobs is something worth celebrating, the truth is different from the 321,000 number.
In reality the numbers look like this: 119,000 new people entered the labor pool, 115,000 people lost their jobs, the number of full-time jobs decreased by 150,000, and part-time jobs increased by 77,000. Not as good as the headlines is it?
The U-3 official unemployment rate stayed steady at 5.8%. 321,000 new jobs but unemployment stayed the same? That’s because the net new jobs was only 4,000.
That official unemployment number never tells the true story anyway. They don’t want to scare the masses and speak the truth. You CAN handle the truth. The truth is the U-6 unemployment number. The U-6 unemployment rate is 11.4% or 1 in 9 Americans.
According to the BLS, U-6 is total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.
What that means is that 1 in 9 Americans either can’t find a job for the past 27 weeks (the number in U-3), can’t find a full-time job only part-time, or have fallen out of the stats because they have been looking longer than 27 weeks.
Not quite the rosy picture now, is it? What are the politicians doing to reduce red-tape, streamline bureaucracy, allow innovation to flourish, and simplify the tax code thus vaulting the United States to the top of business competitiveness?
Later in the video, Ethan covers some of the fallacies of the massive lithium-ion battery because of the sources of lithium.