Amongst those of us with a pulse there exists a recognition that the CPI (Consumer Propaganda Index) is not particularly accurate. Please show me a world in which grocery prices are only up 4.7% from last year, I’d like to live there if you don’t mind.

Less well known are the equally absurd distortions in the unemployment rate. The number that we read in headlines and hear mentioned in breathless news stories propagated by party apparatchiks — our supposedly ultra-robust market for human labor — reflects reality with all the accuracy of a busted funhouse mirror. Here’s what you need to know.

The unemployment rate

As of 2020 the total adult population (everyone 18 and over) of the United States is 258 million men, women and late-stage teenagers. Plus some 85 million dogs and 60 million cats, pets being quite popular in our spacious country. Now if you had to guess, how many of these 258 million adults don’t have a job right now?

105 million.

That’s not a typo or a conspiracy; the Federal Government itself that admits this data to be honest. To get this number all you do is combine the 6 million Americans who are “officially” unemployed with the 99 million Americans who are not in the labor force and viola, 105 million people who ain’t worken. Fascinating!

But that number can’t possibly be right, can it? Have you gone crazy Mr. Capitalist? Yep, you’ve got me… I’ve gone full clickbait and now I’ll walk it back a bit. The 99 million people who are not in the labor force are largely,

• Students in high school, university and trade schools
• Retirees (of which there are tens of millions)
• Stay at home mums
• Prisoners
• Members of Congress
• etc.

However, there are an additional 5.8 million persons who want a job but can’t find one, and these Americans are the reason I wrote this article.

You see, our glorious financial leaders decided that if an American becomes so discouraged by a lack of employment opportunities that they give up on work altogether, that person isn’t counted as unemployed. Goodness no… They are conveniently shuffled out of the unemployment figures and discarded under the “not in the labor force” tally instead. I find this to be batshit insane and highly deceptive.

You’re trying to tell me that there are 5.8 million Americans who want to work but can’t find a job that matches their skill level, and these people don’t count as unemployed because they’ve been out of the job market for too long? I can partially forgive the CPI because it’s impossible to calculate cost increases for an entire population with just one number, but this distortion of employment figures is a lie too great.

If we add the 5.8 million Americans who should be counted as unemployed, to the “officially unemployed” 6 million Americans, the unemployment rate would double to nearly 7%. Not such a robust economy anymore, is it? And while these sanitized numbers are easy to gloss over, let us not forget that these digits actually mean something in the real world.

If you’ve never seen footage from Kensington Ave, Philadelphia, you might find it difficult to believe that this zombie apocalypse is gestating in downtown America. A rosy cheeked economy with lots of opportunities? As one commentator on this video wrote,

So does anyone believe we have 3.5% unemployment???

Conclusions

The distortions in the unemployment rate are unforgivable. It’s a clear case of financial thugs using hand waving and brutal pummeling to beat the data into submission until it cries out in bloody gasps: “I’ll say whatever you want, just please don’t hit me again.”

The problem is that by obfuscating weakness in the jobs market we’re pushing the suck out of sight where nobody has to acknowledge it or takes steps to deal with the lack of high quality jobs. Real wages have been stagnating for decades, why don’t we talk about that for a while?

While it’s trendy to blame economic misfortune on the standing president if he’s not from your party, or the previous chap if you like the guy who’s in office now, I don’t particularly over-blame Biden, Trump or Obama for creating this mess. Yes, they all contributed to a greater or lesser extent, but we’re also dealing with secular forces like offshoring, digitization, aging demographics, automation, a slowdown in multiple large economies around the world, etc.

So in my uneducated estimation the failure isn’t so much that our illustrious leaders are completely responsible for this economic shit storm. Rather, it’s that they’re actively covering it up with data manipulation, diverting our eyes from Kensington Ave and dozens of other streets like it because unemployment is only at 3.6% dear comrade! All you have to do is believe your lying eyes.