Tom Blumer explains why the June civilian labor force number justifies total depression:
The SA (seasonally-adjusted) number for June is bad enough. In fact, June’s seasonally adjusted workforce shrinkage is the largest for any June since 1963.
But the NSA (non-seasonally-adjusted) number representing what really happened is even worse. In a normal June, the workforce increases significantly, because lots of people occupied with other things during the rest of the year typically test the waters in the seasonal and summer-job market. But whereas an average of about 1.75 million did so during the past seven Junes, including almost 1.6 million last year during the recession, only 901,000 did so in June of 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1954 to find a worse June on the ground in the private sector than the June we just experienced. On a population-adjusted basis, June’s figure is the worst performance in the 63 years BLS has been tracking the data.
The only way anybody, especially Teh Won, can claim that we’re headed in the “right direction” with those numbers is if that person’s goal is to make everybody dependent on government.
