Liberals won't topple Tories over EI

The next electoral stooge-off between Whigs n Tories will be whenever Canada's banksters and CEO's say it will be. At least, that's what we've gleaned from government minister Raitt's comments. It'll all be over before anyone can say "corporate welfare bums" and sing the last stanza of DAY-O.

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The next roll over will be number 80.

When Canadians lose their homes, their cars, and their other possessions in greater numbers, in the years to come, perhaps they will then realize that voting Liberal or Conservative is one and the same, and that perhaps they might want to give the NDP a chance, as they couldn't do any worse than what is going on now with this right-wing Harper-Ignatieff coalition.

Even though the article is based on the US situation, it's basically the same thing in Canada

So much for the Liberals caring about the little gal and guy in Canada.

Is Unemployment the Worst Since the Great Depression?
Hidden behind the unemployment rate are some startling numbers

Other people who aren't counted in the official number are those who have been forced by the economy to work part time. The number of workers who wanted full-time jobs but could find only part-time work was 1.8 million last month, which amounts to 1.3 percent of the labor force. Still, that's not as bad as December 1982, when forced part-time workers accounted for 3 percent of the labor force.

What happens when you start counting all these people who have been heavily battered by the labor market? The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another rate that includes "marginally affected workers" and part-time workers. That number, referred to as U-6 because of its identification in bureaureports, was 16.3 percent last month-nearly 7 percentage points higher than the official unemployment rate. What's more, the number of people who have given up on finding work has been steadily rising over the past few months, from 685,000 in May to 796,000 in July. "If you have that number of people leaving the workforce, that seems to me a serious problem," says economist John Lott.

Many people are giving up because the labor market is so bad-but how bad historically? A U-6 rate of more than 16 percent certainly does not compare to the Great Depression, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. And Williams points out that a much larger number of workers were agricultural workers in the 1930s. These farm workers are not included in today's statistics. So, by his estimates, nonfarm unemployment was at 35 percent in 1933). Trying to compare that U-6 number with the early '80s recession gets a bit tricky. The U-6 measurement did not come into use until 1994. Before that, the Bureau of Labor Statistics used a broader measurement, referred to as U-7, to figure out the number of unemployed plus workers dropping out of the labor force. In 1982, U-7 hit a peak of 15.3 percent, below the current U-6 of 16.3 percent. But 1982 should probably look even better compared with the labor market of today. U-7 overestimates the number of discouraged workers compared with how we measure them today. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics started asking people in surveys if they were actually available to work. These and other changes reduced the measurement of discouraged workers by 50 percent, according to some estimates.

So if you care not just about people who meet the official definition of "unemployed" but also about people who are dropping out of the labor force, 2009 seems to be trailing 1982 in terms of the health of the labor market. Williams says that when he takes into consideration people who haven't looked for work in more than a year because they can't find jobs, the real unemployment rate today goes all the way up to 20.6 percent by his calculations. "It won't take much to get it to the worst since the Great Depression," he says.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/economy/2009/08/27/is-unemployme...