Welcome back!
I see that the Labor department has released new figures concerning unemployment and that according to their figures, unemployment is at a fourteen year high of 6.5% as of October '08. There's a problem with this figure however. I believe that it's a lot lower than the actual number of people unemployed.
It's actually quite simple really, the figures that the Labor department is working with are based on statistics of how many people are drawing unemployment. So if you add to that figure the people who can no longer draw unemployment because they've exhausted it without coming up with work, you end up with a much higher figure.
While I guess it doesn't matter in a way because that sort of reporting is just relative anyway, a benchmark that can be used to compare one point with another, I think that it's also a disservice to those people in that condition. In a way, by reaching the point of having used up all resources, they've been dropped off of the radar and are now effectively invisible.
For a very long time we Americans thought of ours as the greatest country on Earth and there are still yet some who believe this. If we'd like others to believe that we're the great nation that we want to believe ourselves to be, then people falling through the cracks wouldn't make such a large percentage of the population.
Unemployment is only one way in which people manage to fall through the cracks in the system, finding others is actually pretty easy. One good way is to spend some time finding out how many people are buried in an avalanche of medical bills that they cannot avoid or pay.
Technorati Tags: unemployment, system failures, socially invisible, government statistics
