If you’ve been following the financial news today, then you saw articles like this one from Yahoo Finance about the unemployment rate falling to 9.7%, which is a five-month low. That sounds like good news, and it could be, but when you look deeper into the numbers and throw some logic into the equation, it doesn’t make sense that the unemployment rate would fall that much. Does this mean the numbers are cooked? Are we on the road to recovery for job loss? I really hope so, because it’s the single most glaring eye sore to our economy right now. It’s the one road block that will keep our economy from heading in the right direction. Here’s a quote from the article I referenced above.
Beneath the headlines, the government reported the U.S. economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession officially began in December 2007, a sharp upward revision from 7.2 million previously reported; that includes 930,000 jobs more than previously estimated in the 12 months ended March 2009.
and here is another quote from a financial analyst trying to explain the discrepancy in the numbers:
“The payroll data and the unemployment rate come from two separate surveys, which explains some of the divergence in the data,” writes Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial, attempting to explain this conundrum. “The drop in the unemployment rate was particularly surprising, as it was predicated on households reporting an increase in employment. This could be capturing the self-employed doing slightly better than they had been, but it is still puzzling.”
What can we believe? Do these numbers and statistics even mean anything, anymore? Wall Street didn’t bite on the headlines. At one point today, the Dow Jones dipped below 10,000, and it finally recovered a little to gain a 10 points. I think Diane Swonk may not have realized it, but she hit the nail on the head when she said that the possibility of the self-employed doing better than they had been. We can’t trust big banks, we can’t trust the government to come up with a balanced budget, and we can’t count on the government to create jobs. So, people are going out and making their own job. They’re taking the self-employed route, and I think that they’re finding success, because that’s the American way.
If we continue to think that the government is going to create jobs for this economy, we are sadly mistaken. It wouldn’t matter if it was a Democratic Congress, a Republican Congress, or a Green Party Congress. Government can’t create lasting jobs. Sure, they can pump a lot of government grant money into a particular industry that will temporarily create new jobs, but most of those jobs will be contract work, not real, lasting careers. The only way to create jobs is for someone like you and me to make a dream into a reality. Start a business and hire employees. That’s the how this country was built. People like Walt Disney, Dale Carnegie, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Truett Cathy are the reason why this country has enjoyed one of the most successful, robust economies the world has ever seen.
Let’s stop talking about what the statistics say and how the government should pass this law and regulate that. Let’s start creating jobs the only way we know how to, and that’s by supporting, encouraging, and training young people to be entrepreneurs. There’s not one school in America that teaches high school kids how to start their own business. They are told to go get a “real job”. Right, like developing a product or service, marketing it, hiring employees, managing inventory, filing quarterly tax estimates, and engaging in customer service isn’t a “real” job?
If we want this country to start putting Americans back to work, WE need to do something about it.
(photo credit: Samyra Serin)
