Keefe: How’s Business?

1. Simon Kuznets, the economist who developed the first comprehensive set of measures of national income (GDP), stated in his first report to the US Congress in 1934, in a section titled “Uses and Abuses of National Income Measurements”:

   The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification.

2. The government (BLS) and Trump are celebrating another unemployment “drop”.

   The reality:
   95.598 MILLION working-age Americans are STILL unemployed, but not counted in official BLS stats (up from 95.502 million in June ’18).
   https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm

   • There are approx 326 million TOTAL people in the country.

   • Less those under 15 (19.8%) and over 65 (13.1%), there are 211 million people of working age.

   So, of those 211 million (not counting full-tiime parents, disabled, etc), 95.598 MILLION are STILL unemployed.

   That is HORRIFIC!

   America is STILL in its second Great Depression, yet Trump, like Obama before him, is keeping the mindless masses busily distracted over senseless issues, like “fake news”, keeping their attention diverted from the continuing disastrous state of the economy.

   This horrible economy is why Americans are so angry, bitter, and continue to turn on each other.

Comments are closed.