Question from a reader:”What is the real unemployment rate? It sure looks like it is closer to 50% instead of 12%.”
My answer is that it depends where you live. If you are living in a town where your entire industry was devoted to a delivery industry like DHL and you were a company town, the unemployment rate is probably frighteningly close to 75-90%. Some small towns where everybody is self employed and relatively self sufficient may be only at 5%.
Judging from the tax returns that I did this year it looks like the unemployment rate may be something like 30-50% and that would explain locally here in Southern California why things are so bad. I can’t speak for other parts of the country but I suspect things are bad all over.
The question is in terms of degree.
The solution, even if you believe that 80% of America is still employed is to still get jobs created and moving all over. In order for people to spend money they need money. They need it in the form of income and not always in the form of credit (which has gotten a lot of people in trouble in the first place).
Remember too that people roll on and off the unemployment roster and it is tough to get a true number until after the fact – generally a month or two later after all the statisitcs are completely accumulated.
Bottom line is to write our President and Congressional representatives and get more companies hiring. Honestly, once the earnings come in and people get comfortable with “less” losses and start investing, I am hoping that hiring will open up. There are a lot of people out there and unemployment benefits eventually will dry up and generally aren’t enough for people and their families to live on.
Good luck to all of us.
April 25 2009
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Kim Isaac Greenblatt
Unemployment Looks Greater Than 12 Percent
Tags: Business, unemployment
[...] a follow up to the questions that I had about how bleak unemployment is I can’t help but wonder how bad things are really out there in the business world. [...]