Weekend Insight Into The Unemployment Numbers

It has become a ritual.

The 'numbers' are published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the end of every month. They suck. By any reasonable standard, they just, well, suck. OS can tell you tales of his unemployed/underemployed friends and family; highly accomplished, energetic, ambitious people who now struggle in a culture and economy that has gone as limp as a sails on a windless day. But, you know those same people. You're surrounded by them. Perhaps you are one of them.

So, instead, OS has another story to tell. He has struck a friendship with a family in his small town that has opened a little restaurant, and blessedly, it is doing well. These folks have three generations of 'little restaurant' in their background, so they know the drill. It's wonderful to see.

The twenty-something son, who is a kid OS would adopt in a heartbeat, shared a story over breakfast Saturday:

He has a friend with a successful small business that provides a very good service throughout the South. It employs a lot of people, because it's one of those enterprises that requires a lot of people to run. In other words, this guy's firm is a job engine, and it can't be outsourced to Mexico or China.

He could expand his business by 50% next week, except--he's looked at the tax code. He's reached the limit of earnings he can take home from his business. Every dollar past what he's doing essentially goes away in taxes. In addition, his payroll costs, workman's comp, Social Security and Medicare costs, health and liability insurance costs, and his administrative costs and complications soar. If he expands, he exposes himself to a lot of risk, and almost no reward.

Soooo...that jobs engine sits idling.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Replicate his story a few thousand times in every state of the Union, stir gently, and you get the BLS numbers at the end of every month.

And you get to watch Christina Romer or some other flack from ObamaLand cheerily assure you that things aren't all that bad, and besides they're getting better, and if they suck it's because those mean Republicans won't let us borrow another trillion to drop from the helicopter and you're being mean by pointing out that we promised this wouldn't happen and you aren't smart enough to understand what I'm saying anyway 'cuz you didn't go to Harvard like I did and we know how to take care of little unwashed people like you I've got to go now and talk to someone else and tell them the same things see you at the end of next month.