What’s driving the unemployment rates down? Is the economy really booming?
More important for us Golden State residents, why is California still doing so poorly compared to the other states?
Here are some answers.
http://riderrants.blogspot.com/2012/10/california-jobs-picture-still-as-dismal.html
There are four factors suggested for our nation’s relatively improving unemployment figures.
1. More private sector hiring.
2. More of the “unemployed” dropping out of the labor market — they no longer count as unemployed.
3. More companies making full-time jobs into part-time jobs — to reduce the costs of ObamaCare and other benefit expenses. It spreads the work around — and gives the illusion of improving unemployment.
4. A federal effort to cook the books by encouraging false responses to the monthly unemployment sample questionnaires.
I don’t think the last one is significant or even true. I’m not a believer in big conspiracies — someone always tattles. I guess we’ll find out after the election — as cooked books on this scale cannot be maintained. If it IS a conspiracy by Obama bureaucrats, we will see an impressive “unexpected adjustment” upward in unemployment rates in December or January.
As for the others, I would rank “2” and “3” ahead of “1” in importance, but it’s hard to say.
But here’s what’s being missed in California. Our state, like the nation, is experiencing a real or not-so-real adjustment in unemployment rates. But our RELATIVE unemployment rate compared to the other states remains just as high as at the height of the recession.
From my updated California fact sheet: