Unemployment? What unemployment?

" In March the unemployment rate fell to 8.7% even though 158,000 jobs were lost and 143,000 jobs were created."
That is a quote from my last post making fun of the math used to determine the unemployment rate. i was trying to point out that when you have more new unemployed people than you do new jobs in a given month then you have MORE unemployed people, and yet the government says the rate comes down. Because they think that we are STUPID.
So, i'm wrong right? Sorry, no, i'm right. Here's the actual quote from the jobs report, "The government says applications for unemployment benefits rose 27,000 to a seasonally adjusted 412,000 for the week ended April 9. That left applications at their highest point since mid-February." So that's really bad right? Unless companies hired more than 412,000 people the unemployment rate went up, and that would prove that the recession was continuing unabated. here's the rest of the report, "Companies added more than 200,000 jobs in March for the second straight month, the first time that has happened since 2006. The unemployment rate fell to a two-year low of 8.8 percent and has dropped a full percentage point since November." Do you see what they did there? 412,000 new applications for unemployment and 200,000 new jobs means that there are nearly a quarter of a million more unemployed people that the 1st of March! It does not mean that there are less unemployed people!!!!! 200,000 - 412,000 = BAD
In other news you have been betrayed by your leaders ....... AGAIN! The budget deal is a total con-job, there are no real cuts to spending, a little "enron math" here and some fuzzy rounding there and a pinch of salt and then bake the whole thing for two weeks in the heat created by threatening to shut down the government and what do you have .... the same crap you had before. Awesome. These guys are seriously just crack addicts, but their crack is spending money on non-sense. I told you that voting them out wouldn't work because it's being voted in that makes them this way, you didn't believe me, but here we are, same ol same ol, no end in sight.
Unemployment answers. Everyone wants to know what is going to fix unemployment, and there are all kinds of false claims and bad economic theory floating around out there. Republicans say that if you don't tax rich people and corporations that they will run out and hire millions of people at great salaries and with great benefits. Democrats say that if you raise taxes on rich people and corporations and give that money to people who do not work for it that somehow jobs will magically appear ... oh, wait i remember, the people will spend the money at walmart and then walmart will need new cashiers. Except if you've been to walmart then you know that it does not induce them to hire when they see 40 people in line at one open cash register ... i think they think it's fun.
So what is the answer? Well, there isn't one answer that works all the time. Wars sure help, but not the kind of war we're fighting now, to fix unemployment with a war you need tons on increased military factory work and in order to sustain the employment rate after the war ends you need lots of soldiers to die. I am not advocating that. I love our soldiers, but that was a big part of the post WWII economic boom in the middle class, a reduced labor force drove up wages, it's a simple supply and demand curve, pure 8th grade economics. If there are a total of 10 jobs in the entire economy and there are 30 applicants, the 10 people hired will not be paid well, and if they don't like it they can be replaced by one of the other 20. If there are only 8 applicants for the same 10 jobs then the picture is different, companies are then competing for the available workers and wages and benefits will be higher. Make sense? I hope so. Which brings me to my solution to the current unemployment problem. I maintain that it is not in fact an unemployment problem, it is instead a reduced household income problem. The problem is not lack of jobs, the problem is that people can't pay their bills due to income reductions and the obvious inflation that the government keeps denying. In most households you have two people competing in an over saturated labor market separately, each one being low balled by their employer. So here's the fix. I need about 50 million people to resign from their jobs. I know that sounds crazy, but the sudden creation of massive numbers of job openings will create a hiring may-lay that will result in people being offered huge salaries and great benefits. So if you are currently married to someone who has been unemployed for 2 years and you have been supporting him, you get to be part of the 50 million and he will get a job that pays as much as you used to make combined. No new jobs, but your finances will be as healthy as ever. The real dirty secret of all the talks in Washington is that you cannot "create" jobs. Demand created jobs, demand for products and services. A restrictive tariff might created jobs, stimulus will not. I know that in the current climate it is the height of misogynistic rhetoric to even suggest it, but if we were a nation where the majority of people only were married one time, and one of those people excluded themselves from the work force, i maintain that we would have no economic crisis. Demand would be less and less production would be required. That all people are entering the work force is driving down the price of labor on the market and at the same time driving up the price of all other commodities. So, there, i said it. The solution to our dilemma is single income families with a stay at home parent ... a return to the way it used to be. A return to the old way, stores closed on Sunday, hands on parenting ... first you just have to realize that toughening up women, emasculating men, having cool gadgets, allowing a generation of children to be raised by day care providers and completely withdrawing from your community into your house, into the digital world, none of it is actually progress. They told you it was progress so that you would consume more ... what could sell cars like getting women to go to work? Gas? Mac and Cheese? It's not progress, and the truth is just beneath the surface of all of our problems ... it's the great leap backwards.