The Fudged US Unemployment Claim Numbers!

Here's an article not to be missed, it's written by Mike 'Mish' Shedlock and published on Financialsense.com: Unemployment Claims: How Bad are the "Real" Numbers?

• Inquiring minds may wish to consider the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) PDF.EUC is a federal emergency extension that can provide up to 33 additional weeks of unemployment benefits.
  
  The first payable week was the week of July 6-12, 2008.The original extension passed in July 2008 paid up to 13 weeks of additional benefits.
  
  Effective November 23, 2008, we can pay up to 7 additional weeks of benefits.Effective December 7, 2008, we can pay up to another 13 weeks of benefits. Adding 2.519 million from the above chart to 6.883 million from the second chart the current real total (assuming nothing else is missing) number receiving unemployment benefits is 9.4 million.
  
  I am unsure how Federal Employees, Newly discharged Veterans, the Railroad Retirement Board, and especially the 346,559 Extended Benefit numbers fit into the EUC 2008 program, but I suspect all those numbers need to be added in as well, making the true count still higher.......
• On a percentage of population basis the 2001 recession was not quite as bad as the 1982 recession, whereas the current recession is 50% worse than the 1980 recession.
  
  Furthermore, the jobs picture is even worse than it looks. The US consumer was nowhere near as leveraged to real estate in 1980 as now. Also note that boomers are heading into retirement now, undercapitalized and looking for jobs, in effect competing against their kids and grandkids for jobs.
  
  Look at the average age of baggers in grocery stores or greeters at Wal-Mart. These people are not working because they want to; they are working because they have to. Demand for jobs is at an all time high while the number of available jobs and the pay scales of those jobs have both collapsed. The employment situation is not only an unmitigated disaster, things are about to get even worse with pending state cutbacks.