Unemployment Horror Show

Don't believe all the happy talk you hear from Washington and Wall Street.

There was great rejoicing last week over a batch of bogus unemployment numbers that purported to show that jobs were back on the growth path in the US. Yours truly begs to differ with the happy talk. First, the unemployment rate remained at 9.7%. It didn't move. So how did this alleged "job creation" help.

Second of all, 48,000 of these "jobs" were in fact temp jobs paid for by the US government. No, they weren't part of the "stimulus" plans inflicted on taxpayers by Obamanation. (See more here under the heading "A Recovery in Name Only.") They were (and are) census jobs, the result of the 10-year census provision that's actually part of the US Constitution. They more or less had to be created anyway, and they'll go away in a few months.

Third of all, as many have pointed out before me, the "unemployment rate" itself doesn't include people who've run out of unemployment bennies or people who have simply given up looking for work. It's been calculated by several sources that the real unemployment rate hovers around 17%. Washington (particularly the current iteration) doesn't want you to know. Allows them to fiddle with more ways to tax workers and businesses that are left. Meanwhile, businesses are petrified to take on new employees, fearing that ever increasing Federally ordered benefit and tax increases will crush them. So they wait, wait, wait to see if healthcare coverage really plays out, if crap and trade actually happens, etc.

To get a picture of what has happened to unemployment since problems started coming to a head in 2007, take a gander at the video below. The map, broken down by county, shows growth in unemployment dating from 2007 thru January 2010. This is a small chart, so remember that the darker the colors, the worse the unemployment.

A bigger, easier to view version of this graphic appears here. Pretty stunning, don't ya think? As they used to say on the old Batman TV show: The worst is yet to come! (Particularly if you're already unemployed.) UPDATE: Earlier link was incorrect, now fixed here. Hat tip to one of our eagle-eyed commentators.