Quote of the Week (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update)

“In a little over one hundred days, this Recovery Act has worked as intended."

This was intended?



(UPDATE #1): Why it’s worse than advertised/you think:

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

(ed: It's bad enough that here in California even state workers have been ordered to take 3 furlough days/month)

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

(emphasis ours)

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

For the rest of the cheery news from Mort Zuckerman, go here.