In Case You Have Trouble Sleeping: A Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
You can go here http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm to see the report. If it does help you sleep, it will probably give you nightmares. You can see in the first line of the report, released last Thursday, that they expect total employment "…to increase by 15.3 million, or 10.1 percent, during the 2008-18 period…"
Now, that may sound encouraging, but if you push a few calculator buttons, that’s on average about 125,000 jobs a month over ten years. Well maybe that sounds good to you too, but it sounds less good if you realize that 125,000 jobs a month is more or less what we need just to provide the jobs required by an increasing population.
You do yourself a disservice if all you do is listen to the monthly unemployment number thrown at us by the talking heads in the mass media. Earlier this month, for example, they announced that the unemployment rate had fallen from 10.2% to 10%. Obviously, lower is a good thing, but the reason it was lower was because 98,000 people who had stopped looking for work (the "discouraged" workers as they are called) were taken out of the unemployment calculation.
It’s a little more work, but I really suggest you try and get at least some of your news somewhere besides the popular press.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!