Quote:
Originally posted by onetime2
Certainly there is a portion of unemployed who have become discouraged and are no longer looking, but this is far from a large segment of the unemployed. As outlined earlier in the thread there are many components to the unemployment figure, pointing to just those that have dropped out of the labor force is naive at best and flat out misleading at worst.
Once again, for those that missed it, the economy is far more complicated than a sound bite mentality allows.
|
First of all, I stated that I would defer to the economists (which I think you claimed to be) in terms of the larger picture--no need to insult me by inferring that I'm naive or misleading.
I was pointing out two trends that were apparent in the article FEL posted--that millions of workers (5 million, actually) have been relegated to part-time positions against their will (creating a total of 24 million part-time workers) and that 1.5 million have stopped looking for work for various reasons.
Now if you want to claim that the article isn't the entire picture, fine; it certainly isn't naive to respond that the particular article isn't evidence of a strong economy and doesn't claim that unemployment has gone down due to an expanding economy. In fact, there didn't seem to be any evidence of "growth" in the article except for a few sectors that experienced relative upward trends in hiring. That is, while companies hired workers they did so below the normative rate according to past years.
When I heard Greenspan speak about the topic before Congress he didn't seem as content with the long-term prospects of our economic structure but maybe you heard him somewhere else.
As to the "soundbite mentality": everyone reading this can probably tell by now that we are thinking about these matters and aren't just getting our information from an hourly cable news show.