With 100 million filers for UE under Obama official May 18th, how accurate is the count, given ETA exclusions?

The Department of Labor estimates a broad range of survey-based metrics for employment data through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while actual nationwide counts are kept through a sister division, the Employment & Training Administration (ETA). The ETA has kept weekly figures from state administered employment offices for each of our United States for nearly a half century, but the DOL restricts its summary counts to quarterly employers’ payroll figures on the ETA site. Americans who’ve said in poll after poll that jobs and the economy are the issues of most importance to the country seem hungry for real counts and supportable data, rather than seasonally adjusted BLS figures for release, which are just statistically manipulated survey results from individual households and businesses rotated on a four-month basis.

When U3 and U6 rates were slashed last fall with nowhere near the number of jobs added to the economy as those purged from the BLS’ ranks of unemployed and marginally unemployed discouraged job seekers, former Commissioner of the BLS, John Hall, whose four-year stint ended in January 2012, called the figures his former agency released “deeply flawed.” A former Chief of Staff with the Department of Labor went further, when Rick Manning ridiculed last fall’s findings, saying “It appears that Obama has hired infamous Iraqi Information Minister Baghdad Bob to calculate the unemployment rate. Anyone who takes this unemployment report seriously is either naive or a paid Obama campaign adviser.”

In light of what insiders and some highly respected business leaders and economists noted during the purge of more than 5 million unemployed from BLS counts, with little more than 2 million showing up as job growth weighted heavily in part-time positions, the ETA counts should be recognizable as more honest, representative employment figures. After all, they provide the only real, comprehensive counts of the workforce and the nation’s unemployed who’ve filed new claims for unemployment through UEI offices around the country.

The cumulative count for Americans displaced from gainful employment since Obama took the Presidency topped 100 million over the weekend. An official number approaching 100,250,000 will be available once Thursday’s ETA advance report is released for losses counted through the week ended Saturday, May 18th. The almost unthinkable 100 millionth American displaced by Obama’s workforce purge filed the claim the DOL recognized as imminent last Tuesday before adding another quarter million jobs losers through the end of the week.

That count is considered more accurate than anything America’s statistical wizards at the Census Bureau turn out and is as close to indisputable as any the U.S. Government keeps.

There is a caveat, however. The DOL and ETA describe Americans whose income and means of support have disappeared without having paid sufficiently into their states’ unemployment insurance program to qualify for benefits.

While the official ETA data collected nationwide just topped the century mark in millions, more inclusive counts would show that we long ago distanced from 100 million Americans who've lost jobs under Obama. Not all workers are covered by Unemployment Insurance. Those excluded, for example, come from the ranks of self-employed, a significant percentage of commission-based earners, contract and short-term workers, unpaid family workers, workers in a range of not-for-profit organizations, and other small (primarily seasonal) categories which don't pay enough into UI to accumulate benefits. Additionally ineligible are unemployed individuals who've not yet earned benefit rights, disqualified workers whose unemployment is considered to have resulted from their own actions rather than from economic conditions, and otherwise eligible unemployed individuals who don’t file for benefits.

How many more unemployed beyond the 100.25 million the ETA will show in cumulative counts through the weekend do you believe the above categories have contributed thus far, midway into the second quarter of Obama’s fifth year in Office? Keep in mind, the number of workers paying into UEI programs when Bush turned the economy over to Obama in January 2009 was 133,886,830, before Obama’s ugly purge slashed 8.3 million jobs after taking Office through mid-year 2011. The latest May 2013 employers’ payroll count shows 129,204,324 American workers, which remains 4.67 million down from the number the President inherited 4 ½ years ago. Incredibly, some 30 million newcomers from amongst the nation’s secondary and higher education graduates, legal immigrants (LPRs), and not-so-legal migrants sought gainful employment as new entrants to the workforce during Obama’s first term. This month and June combined should add another 4.5 million graduates to that count in search of work.

http://www.rockymountainperspective.com/985-millio...