~NightSky

By Michael Snyder

Our long slide toward economic oblivion continues, and survey after survey has shown that most Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of the U.S. economy. Inflation is out of control, most Americans are getting poorer due to the rapidly rising cost of living, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the commercial real estate market is a giant mess. But employment is supposed to be our bright spot. The Biden administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent and that there are lot of jobs available for those that want them. But is this really true?

To answer that question, it is imperative to understand that our government places unemployed persons into one of two categories…

Jobless people are classified into one of two categories by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—either unemployed or not in the labor force. To be classified as unemployed in the month they are surveyed, people must be actively looking for work. If they are not actively looking, they are classified as not in the labor force.

Over time, the definition of “officially unemployed” has gotten more restrictive, and today only 6.097 million working age Americans are considered to be in that category.

Meanwhile, a staggering 99.800 million working age Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”.

When you add both categories together, you get a total of 105.897 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

Let me try to put that into perspective.

During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that number never even got up to 90 million.

So that means that the number of working age Americans that are not employed at this moment far surpasses anything that we witnessed during the Great Recession.

Please do not believe the garbage that the federal government is trying to sell you.

Unemployment is not low. In fact, John Williams estimates that the real rate of unemployment in this country is somewhere around 25 percent.

If you are out of work at this moment, please realize that you are not alone.

In April, 37-year-old North Carolina resident Al Brown lost his job, and now his family is really struggling…

Al Brown and his fiancée faced a tough call in May when reviewing their weekly budget: What’s a higher priority, more food or dish soap?

Based in Concord, North Carolina, Brown was the main breadwinner for his fiancée and their two children. Then in April, he was let go from his job as a global director of business development at software company Cascade.

He’s since quit his gym membership and sold miscellaneous items around his home, including a computer and yard furniture, to make ends meet. His 13-year-old son quit the basketball team. While losing the family’s source of income has taken a financial toll, it’s also resulted in a mental one.

Since he was laid off, Brown has submitted more than 600 job applications, but that has produced only a few interviews and no job offers…

Brown, 37, now spends his days scouring the internet for jobs or reaching out to potential connections. After filing over 600 applications, only a handful have produced interviews, he says.

If jobs are easy to get, why hasn’t Al Brown been able to find one?

Can anyone out there explain that to me?

Perhaps I am just a little slow, because what the Biden administration is telling us about the economy does not seem to correspond with reality at all.

54-year-old Nina McCollum has applied for “hundreds of jobs” since losing her position in March, and she is still jobless as well…

Nina McCollum, 54, was laid off from her writing gig at jobs site Glassdoor back in March. She hasn’t found a new role since, despite applying to hundreds of jobs.

She’s been living off her savings, selling her blood plasma and frequenting food pantries just to get by — all while taking care of a teenage son. Her domestic partner helps out, but he can’t make up for her lost income.

Why can’t these people find work?

What is wrong with them?

Of course the truth is that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. They are diligently searching for jobs, but the reality of the matter is that the employment market has gotten very tight.

Meanwhile, the cost of living just continues to rise, and that has resulted in a “collapse of household savings”…

In February, the U.S. personal savings rate was estimated to be around 4.6 percent—much below the decades-long average of about 8.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But what does this mean?

Some economists think that the collapse of household savings could lead to a spending slowdown and trigger a recession.

The Biden administration may never admit that we have entered a major economic downturn, but that is precisely what we are witnessing.

In fact, the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing purchasing managers index has now been below 50 for eight months in a row…

The U.S. manufacturing sector fell deeper into recession territory in May, extending a multimonth slump as experts warn that the economy faces “clear challenges.”

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said in a report Monday that its manufacturing purchasing managers index dropped to 46.0 last month, the lowest reading since May 2020 and the eighth consecutive sub-50 reading.

Any readings below 50 represent recession, with all key sub-components in contraction, including the employment index, suggesting layoff pressures are building.

It’s really happening.

Other than for a brief period during the pandemic, we have not seen economic turmoil of this magnitude since 2008 and 2009.

Unfortunately, we are still only in the very early chapters of this crisis.

The economic outlook for the remainder of 2023 is very bleak, the outlook for 2024 is even worse, and the long-term outlook is nightmarish.

But you have to give our leaders credit for propping things up for as long as they did. By flooding the system with money, they were able to delay our moment of reckoning for a long time.

Of course their gimmicks were also making our long-term problems even worse, and now our long-term problems have become our short-term problems.

There is so much pain ahead of us, and our country is not prepared to handle it.