Small Firms, Mass Layoffs

Ben "spend like there's no tomorrow" Bernanke said the other day that a "double dip" recession was unlikely. "That's good news" replied one of the fools asking the questions. But as has been pointed out numerous times recently, the "recovery", such as it is, is artificial, any "growth" being mostly the temporary result of government "stimulus", from last years attempt to revive auto sales with "Cash for Clunkers" to the housing tax credit and expansion of employment through the hiring of temporary census workers and all the other useless spending throwing our money down the rat hole (did you know that when a single person reaches an income of $34,000 they fall into a 25% Federal tax bracket (soon to be 28%)? When you add Social Security taxes and state and local taxes in to the mix, it's a wonder any of us have any money left over to live on (and you though slavery was abolished in this country...Hahaha!)

Anyway, old Nick J. (that's me) thinks it's all gonna come home to roost soon. I heard on the radio driving to work that the unemployment rate went down slightly, then the announcer said that was due to "discouraged" workers being removed from the statistics because they've stopped looking for jobs, another example of the basic dishonesty of all government. One thing I was wondering is, how those workers are no longer considered unemployed, I mean, if they were recently removed from the number of unemployed, when did they stop hoping to find a job and when did their unemployment benefits run out? Aren't they extending those benefits to infinity? If you're receiving unemployment benefits, you're still unemployed, right? And a discouraged worker is defined as someone who was looking for work in the past 12 months but has given up the search, believing no jobs are available to them, so when did theses new "discouraged" (who are no longer considered among the unemployed) first lose their jobs?

"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted. It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."- Gerald Celente

In any event, there are some new people to add tho the rolls, as more firms engaged in mass layoffs in June;

... it doesn't hit the April spike, but it does rise above the number of firms that had mass layoffs in February and March. This could imply that relatively smaller businesses are reducing their workforces.

...

If this is the case, then a labor market recovery will be even that more difficult. Most job growth comes from smaller firms. If many are still laying people off, then this confirms a very slow decline for the unemployment rate.

...John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.-source.