This is not a recovery.
Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped by 24,000 last week to 399,000 as more workers lost their jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday. At the same time, the economy continues to lose workers.
A recovery is marked by a surge in workforce, employment, productivity, and purchasing power. A recovery is not a meek return to wobbling stability, but a furious boom with catching up to do. The media is covering this up. They know that they can explain the difference once a week, while trumpeting the “recovery” one hundred times per day (about once each fifteen-minute headline rotation), and they’ve covered their bases.
Notice that nobody ever talks about actual jobs. The administration on the one hand speaks of jobs “saved or created”, which is meaningless because it is unmeasurable, and on the other, they deal in “new jobless claims”. Why are we using a welfare program to measure the health of our productivity? Because it allows the government to measure one thing while claiming that it represents another. It is the equivalent of “proving” my income by citing new debt not incurred.
Here’s one of my favorite passages from Orwell’s 1984:
Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
There is no recovery.
