Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 26, 2010

Any response I have would be flagged as “inappropriate” so never mind.

This is so uncomfortably close to the truth. Gummiment-numbers are so tweeked and obfuscated!

The politicians looking for election are saying that they are going to create jobs. If they just redefine ‘collecting money on street corners’ as a ‘job’ then they’ve “created” a large number of ‘jobs’ without much work at all.

Yeah! Finally, something anti-government.

Next strip, government census taker counting himself.

I thought it ironic that when the census was over, all of the census takers were unemployed.

@NebulousRikulau much the same way Reagan “lowered” poverty by changing the official definition.

Maybe Nancy Pelosi was thinking of this when she said “Let me say that unemployment insurance… is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy.”

It’s almost election time. Time to go to the cemetery and register everyone to vote ;-)

Yes, Sheik I was a Census taker, but that was only to augment my 18 hr per week job that used to be full time until Bush baby got into office. Notice I didn’t say elected.

“Maybe Nancy Pelosi was thinking…” Actually, I imagine she meant that money given to the unemployed goes immediately for the purchases of goods and services, which immediately stimulates the economy. Unlike giving tax breaks to the rich, who can afford to merely pocket the money until the economy improves, wasting taxpayers money and not helping the economy a bit.

This comes out on Job Report day? Did Wiley do this on purpose?

Almost election time, be sure to vote, and vote often.

Vote once for me!

Very green of you, Wiley, recycling this Jan 2006 assessment. Correct as it is.

Cartoonists need vacations too. Don’t want any finger cramps!

I do find it amazing that labor statistics don’t count anyone as unemployed “who has given up looking because they can’t find a job”. That was a Reagan era change - but no politician wants to bear the burden of explaining the ‘sudden rise in unemployment’ if they were to change the rules back.

Federal unemployment statistics come out of the Census Bureau (as do almost all government statistics) and it uses federal standards. What Oregon, or any state does, isn’t going to impact the US numbers. I use to work for the Census Bureau. While it’s numbers are sometimes questionable, this isn’t one of their problems.

Assuming the panhandler above isn’t looking for a job, he definitely wouldn’t be unemployed. Given that people asking for hand-outs can make a surprisingly good income, calling him self-employed is probably both correct and accurate.

I believe the not counting people who aren’t looking predates Reagan. If someone isn’t looking for a job, how can you tell if they want a job or not? The original problem was how to count housewives. The solution was to simply drop them from consideration since they didn’t have a paid job and weren’t looking for one.

Housewives traditionally haven’t been counted as “workers” for purposes of national economic statistics, and it’s been going on for a very long time – economist John Meynard Keynes once joked that a man who marries his housekeeper lowers the national income. (Economists think this is a very funny joke, you know.)

The only immediate and effective way to make a dent in unemployment is the way they did it during the Great Depression: make the Federal government itself the employer of last resort. The work was pretty much menial, and only marginally useful, but it was work – not just handing out money and hoping that job creation would somehow magically result. If high unemployment lasts long enough, I foresee the idea coming around again.

It’s not just the government! (Though I don’t deny that the government does it.) Companies do very similar things to make their statistics look good. In fact, the most flagrant example I can think of comes not from government, but from my onetime employer.

There was a very unpopular move of a large number of jobs halfway across the country, in the middle of a big project. Those working on the project told me that they had a 70% loss of people, and the completion got set back two years. The official company position was a 10% loss, which created no delay in completion.

I found out that the difference came from the exit interviews conducted by personnel (now they’d be called HR). No matter what the soon-to-be-ex employee’s stated reason for leaving, if they had a job lined up for more money then the reason (for statistical purposes) was “better job”, not dissatisfaction with the move. It was a time of high demand for engineers. I don’t know where they found that 10% that did NOT get a job with higher pay. Maybe those guys just decided to retire rather than move.

@ghostkeeper, Scud missiles were the enemy as far as the U.S. was concerned. Were you on the Iraqi side? Patriot missiles were given credit for shooting down Scuds. To kill a Scud, the Patriot only needed to blow up close to it. If not damaging it, it could throw the aim off target. The Patriot was not the success it was declared to be, but it probably kept some Scuds from being fired.

SCAATY,,, The menial work of several depression agencies are still being enjoyed by many today. Almost every day, I use roads and bridges built by the WPA (some by my father). I enjoyed camping and still enjoy using the facilities at state campgrounds and lakes built by the CCC and I could go on. Today, our infrastructure is getting a facial uplift and needed improvements to our road systems but the waterline and sewage lines are being neglected because they are underground and would be a great inconvenience to residents to have their streets torn up, especially just after being repaved.

Thank You Justice22

I certainly meant no disrespect to anyone who worked on WPA projects – some of them were useful and durable public works. Others were make-work, like leaf-raking; but my point was that they were all jobs, not simply mailing out checks. There is a dignity in any work done well that nothing else can substitute for.

And I still see something like the WPA coming around again, simply because we’re having a “jobless recovery”, to the extent that we’re having a recovery at all. The political right (and the miscellaneous, like the Tea Party) will have a hissy fit the first time an actual politician has the courage to raise the possibility, but necessity makes the unthinkable perfectly possible – “Hunger is the best sauce.”

Let the government be the employer? If that were the government’s job, and a might big “If” that is, would income tax be withheld? Would they withhold money from your paycheck to pay you, again withholding to pay you—–

And where pray tell, would this fantasy money come from, big printing presses in Washington? Remember Carter’s 18% inflation. Or maybe China would be our banker again. Hey, what happened to almost $800 billion that was going to employ everyone?

Roosevelt an his New Deal, Social Security and manipulation of numbers in the Supreme Court didn’t get us out of the Depression, it was American Industry gearing up for a war time economy. If American wealth hadn’t supported that industry, you’d be speaking German or Japanese.

So scream your liberal cry, “Tax the rich” Just remember, someone has to invest in the industries that create jobs and keep America free. Love your county, buy some stock in it.

Maybe American wealth should help people here…..it certainly doesn’t supply enough jobs for everyone who wants to work. Stimulus money isn’t spent to turn the economy around, necessarily. It’s a life preserver to keep people and the states from drowning in the mean time. I’m told we are a rich country, so there must be money enough to save peoples lives around here someplace!

We owe almost all of our state parks and forests in Michigan to WPA and CCC workers. People who hunt and fish and hike and camp should praise Roosevelt for giving them places to do it. Private industry would never do that. Their idea of a park is Disneyland……

An extra panel would of shown an IRS agent carrying off the hat…

Or maybe our economy and society have undergone a sea change, and will never be the same. See:

http://tinyurl.com/2cneapg

In that case, all of the heat over which political party has The Answer is moot; we’d be like the Tea Party folks, demanding to have back the America of the 1950s (the way they remember it, that is) – what’s gone is gone, and it’s not coming back, so we’d best deal with it and get on with the new reality.

Lewreader,

Where did American Industry get the money to gear up for the war time economy? From the Government!

Look at the GDP from 1929 to 1945. It drops from 1929 to 1933. Why? Because after the crash the government stopped spending and balanced the budget. And the economy got worse. When FDR came in he began spending and you can see the GDP rise from 1933 to 1945. The small dip at 1937? FDR cut spending.

Yes, WWII got us out of the depression but that was due to the massive government spending needed to prosecute the war.

As long I keep making direct-to-home video movies, I won’t strave.

I’m curious to know how many of the counted “unemployed” are actually employable. Drop-outs, able bodied men with underwear showing over their pant waists, men and women with multiple tattoos showing, foul mouthed, unable to fill out a form correctly-you get the picture. Yet they are counted in the “percent” that is so scary these days.

Grazer, yes, that fifth panel would have been a perfect “walk-off”

Right On, bgerard! The FDR administration got frightened at the rising deficit and cut back spending in 1937. The effect was swift. Within weeks, the GDP plummeted and unemployment shot up - a “double-dip” in 1938.

By the way, Sweden was the first industrial nation to recover fully from the Great Depression. They had restored their economy by 1934 through a Keynesian policy of heavy government intervention and deficit spending.

For those who want to disagree, look up the history. “Them’s the facts, pure and simple.”

Big deficits can get a nation into trouble, but failing to spend when it’s needed can lead to disaster.

In this down-turned economy, we may see more of these self-employed types on street corners. It might be a good time to invest in cardboard.

Obamanomics at work.

Obamanomics? Or just plain economics and human nature? What really did happen to that stimulus money? I’ve heard too many reports of corporate execs keeping it for themselves and letting their employees starve; the rich get richer, the poor remain poor. Either Obama is a naive idealist, or he’s giving us some painful object lessons about how things really work–and don’t work. He’s proving things to the American sheeple, knowingly or not, the only way we seem to learn–the hard way. That is, if we even bother to learn from our mistakes at all. History has proven we often don’t. I’m not making a judgement one way or the other; I’m simply stating my observations. Well…okay, maybe I am giving a bit of opinion; humans are, IMO, sheep. Those who think they aren’t often prove to be even more sheep-like. I know I can be one.

And folks, remember it’s a comic! Yeah, it may hit close to home, but it’s meant to be satire and not political commentary. So please, keep the posts civil and save any ideological rants for somewhere else.

It was also during the Reagan administration that members of the military were counted toward unemployment statistics.

do the panhandlers in the Wal Mart parking lot still make more than the employees inside? this from 2008…: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/15157611.html