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A change in food stamp benefits for up to a million people such as this one is affecting WalMart’s profits. Something must be done. (Photo by FaceMePLS/Flickr)
In this, the eighth successful year of our Glorious Recovery from the Great Recession, things are really looking up for the American Lower Class, formerly known as Middle. The unemployment rate as calculated by the U.S. Government (adjusted for inflation, seasonally adjusted, smoothed, combed and curried) is down to a piddling five per cent, which is regarded by the country-club set as better-than-full employment, because, they suspect, thousands of people are working against their will. Moreover, the number of able-bodied adults capable of working, but not working, classified as “not in the labor pool” and therefore not unemployed (and thus not included in the calculation of the unemployment rate) is only up to 95 million people.
Things are looking so good for poor people that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 of them are being dropped from SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp program, this year. Some 20 states are reinstating the three-month limit on benefits to adults 18-49 who are not disabled or raising children. Thus freed from a crippling dependency on government handouts, these poorest of the poor are doing much better now, many of them actually motivated to go out and create jobs — in the field of heroin marketing, for example.
Surprisingly, it turns out there’s a downside to cutting Food Stamp benefits. It has been a serious blow to the sales of WalMart and Dollar General Stores — the sector of the retail market known as the Bottom Feeders. In addition to the fact that the employees of these stores need Food Stamps to survive (witness WalMart’s warm-hearted annual drive to collect canned SpaghettiOs so their employees and their families can have a Christmas Dinner), it turns out that the stores also need Food Stamps to survive.
Dollar General last week reported an 18% drop in its stock price after it reported disappointing sales, and found itself in a price-cutting war with WalMart, all since the food stamp cuts started to materialize. DollarTree reported similar problems. Cutting prices on staple items will reduce profits further, of course, but the companies hope it will allow them to hang on to their customers until things get better. (As we all know, things always get better, always before the system breaks down. That rule is as inviolate as the one we all relied on in 2008, the one that said: housing prices never go down.)
As we wait for things to get better, we cannot help but notice that they are getting worse. A Google Consumer Survey conducted this month found that more than 60% of all Americans — not just the Lower Class — have less than $1,000 in total savings. And 20% don’t have any. None.
Forbes, the magazine of the 1%, immediately ran a piece debunking the claim. “It’s Simply Not True,” thundered the headline. After clearing its throat for a number of paragraphs, down near the end, the article admitted that well, yes, it was true, actually, but irrelevant because these people have credit cards, don’t they? They’ll be fine.
So you see the problem.
Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said last week he has been surprised to learn that while things seem to be getting better on the surface, they are most definitely not getting better down where his customers live. There, rents are expensive and rising, home ownership is out of the question, and so is health care insurance, while the costs of health care and medicines are skyrocketing. But Mr. Vasos known exactly where to place the responsibility, and find the hope. “Our core customer,” he said proudly, “is very resilient,” and will “figure it out over time.”
So now we know the solution.
A “Crude & Rude” UNEMPLOYMENT & LABOR FORCE analysis(?)
(I hope the formatting, below, remains “clear enough.”)
Using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#2013.E2.80.932014_birth_data_by_race – 3rd table “Total”-column numbers), as of 2014…
1. 243,110,256 = TOTAL Potential(?) Labor Force(LF), per BLS everyone age 16 & up
2. 27,832,721 = # age 70 & up, included in Lines 1 & 3
3. 40,267,984 = # age 65 & up, included in Line 1
4. 95,000,000 = TOTAL “NOT in LF” (NiLF) per BLS(?)
5. 148,110,256 = Line 1 minus Line 4, i.e. “Actual(?)” LF
6. 7,405,513 = Reported # UNEMPLOYED, per BLS = 5% of Line 5
7. 67,167,279 = Line 4 minus Line 2, calc. NiLF, age 16-69
8. 54,732,016 = Line 4 minus Line 3, calc. NiLF, age 16-64
So, either…
9. 215,277,535 = Line 5 plus Line 7, i.e. calc. “Real(?)” LF age 16-69
10. 74,572,792 = Line 6 plus Line 7, i.e. calc. “Real(?)” # UNEMPLOYED
10a. 34.6% = Line 10 fraction of Line 9
11. 40,989,153 = Line 6 plus 1/2 of Line 7 (for disability, etc., a lot?)
11a. 19.0% = Line 11 fraction of Line 9
…OR…
12. 202,842,272 = Line 5 plus Line 8, i.e. calc. “Real(?)” LF age 16-64
13. 62,137,529 = Line 6 plus Line 8, i.e. calc. “Real(?)” # UNEMPLOYED
13a. 30.6% = Line 13 fraction of Line 12
14. 34,771,521 = Line 6 plus 1/2 of Line 8 (for disability, etc., a lot?)
14a. 17.1% = Line 14 fraction of Line 12
Therefore, I think one can safely presume that the actual/real/true “unemployment rate” is somewhere north of 15%! For further edification, click http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet and below the title, “Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject,” in the “Change Output Options” set the range “From: 1950 To: 2016” and contemplate “Why?!” the “Labor Force Participation Rate” was lower than today, 1950 thru 1980, but most families/people were “better-off” then than now. Also, ask yourself, or anyone else, “How did such a milignant batch of cheats/frauds/liars/morons get into such positions of, ahem, authority?” Oh, that’s right, we the abjectly ignorant and overwhelmingly distracted people “elected” the even less intelligent/sane fuckwits who appointed/hired them. Nonetheless, it matters not which “lesser evil(s)” wins the upcoming elections, the future of pain, suffering and death for all is already baked-in, pun intended.
(Please feel free to abase/correct me for any errors I may have made above.)
Correction… last link to BLS won’t work, but http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 should show the appropriate page.
A wise man recently said there is a difference between the news and information. No better illustration of this premise exists than in the sphere of employment, where the news presents the viewer with fantasy figures, whilst information is nowhere to be found.
It’s becoming a standard of all sorts of news to offer all manner of unsupported assertions with one common denominator, in every case they support a world view stemming from a world that no longer exists.
The impression one gets is that of a desperate attempt to maintain a deceased status quo through wishful thinking, as if constantly repeating 5% unemployment rates, for example, will somehow manifest it. Substitute any topic for unemployment, rinse and repeat, and such becomes an exercise in escapist fiction so pervasive it actually eclipses the annoying holocaust meme.
Frankly, I don’t know if it’s better to pity the industry or despise it, so today I do neither, I simply turn it off.
Unemployment figures (lies, obfuscation and wishful thinking that they are) are so far removed from reality (as Colin indicates above) as to be unbelievable by any sane citizen. Not only have all the well-paying jobs vanished in the giant economic sinkhole that has only grown wider and deeper since 2009, but the jobs remaining barely pay enough to live on, as most of us know from direct experience. I made more in high school than I do at my adjunct college teaching position (that has now been limited to at most 2 classes per semester). If I didn’t have side gigs (and a wife with a full time job), I’d be homeless. Retirement seems to be out of the question, since we keep working at these soul-crushing, stress-inducing “jobs” in toxic work environments.
I know it will all end badly, but until then, it’s simply hopeless, tenuous and depressing. Staving off the wolves at the door is a continuous enterprise, and one dares not run out of energy or the result will be immediate. Motivation has become mental torture, since the only way for the global economy to “go” is down and out. The powers that be have engineered their own demise, but it will more than likely take us “commoners” out first (at least that looks to be the “plan”).
Thank you for shining light on the fiction of U.S. unemployment statistics Mr. Lewis. Your wit makes this serious reading at least palatable (akin to gallows humor).
Tom, Mike and Tom, the English playwright Harold Pinter once referred to a “manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” But, said Pinter, “it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
Such is the world we now inhabit, unless of course it is happening to you, if in doubt remember the last sentence because that is what it is.
The same game on employment and the cost of living is played everywhere, the statistics are just junk, you only have to look around and do a straw poll of your own community to see and know that but then as we know it is of no interest.
Ah yes, MH, the crux of the issue.
Of course, the common method for dismissal is to paint such obvious occurrences as “conspiracy theory”. The result is that genuine conspiracies are overlooked, such as the role of cocaine in the global economy, that is, the so called legitimate economy, as documented by Eduardo Saviano. Let’s not forget George Soros’ pet colour revolutions, that are inevitably followed by a looting of natural resources, read coal in defunct Yugoslavia, infrastructure looting, Ukraine, and replacement governments that are less enlightened, more aggressive, and demonstrably worse than what they replaced, namely everywhere unfortunate enough to host his version of “democracy”.
Then there is the persistent admission that the USA is arming, aiding, and abetting the very terrorists it’s claiming to fight, let’s not forget that cute photo of McCain grinning with his terrorists in Syria before the peace prize per kicked off yet another war there.
None of this makes sense in a world sanitized of “conspiracy”, but look at the power games and it all starts fitting together. Yes, I think Mr. Pinter actually deserved his Nobel prize.
That’s peace prize prez. , not peace prize per. I wonder who programs these editor functions, oh wait, it’s the same ones whose education is designed to ruin critical thinking. Bertrand Russell claimed such was his goal in Science and Society in 1951…seems he succeeded.
Full title, The Impact of Science on Society, pub. 1952. If you believe that the wonder of human experience is best known by a free and open mind, then this “great educator” and his legacy is your implacable enemy.