I used to be a devotee of CNBC every morning. I would watch the stock market climb or fall, listen to the anchors tell me how to invest my money and believe every word of it.

That was wrong.

I don’t watch it anymore, I can’t. The news is depressing. What’s worse, I know it is wrong. Let us take for example, the unemployment rate.

Today, the government told us that 85,000 jobs were lost in the month of December. It’s OK they say, unemployment stays true at 10%. That number is bad enough, but it isn’t accurate.

That 10% number is based upon the numbers of unemployment claims filed across the country. It doesn’t count the people who have lost their unemployment benefits, but don’t yet have a job. It doesn’t count small business owners who can’t avail themselves of the unemployment funds.

In essence, 10% is not a real number. But it gets reported on the news to me every night as “not as bad as it could have been”. It’s never as Bad as it could have been! It can always be worse! The nightly news is wonderful at ‘spin’. Nowhere else could someone smile and tell me that 85,000 jobs were lost last month and that is a good thing.

But I digress.

The true issue is real unemployment. That number includes all the people who are not counted on unemployment rolls. I’ve seen some blog posts that put the number as high as 34%, but that seems grossly unrealistic to me. No the U6 number (actually a government number that does account for the caveats of unemployment noted above) puts our true unemployment rate at 17.4%, up .1% from last month.

I guess that is probably also a low estimate, so my personal opinion is that real unemployment is about 20%. That means 1 in 5 people are unemployed right now. They can’t find work and they aren’t going to in the near future.

If you think about the people who you know, my guess is that if you know 10 people at least 1 or more don’t have a job right now.

Bankruptcy is a valuable tool for the individual debtor and if you find youself unemployed or know someone who is unemployed, they should avail themselves of the bankruptcy laws and get a fresh start. This is how I look at things on a micro economic scale. You have a duty to make sure your famliy comes before you creditors. On a macroeconomic scale, we need to get back to work. We need job creation. American society doesn’t want a hand out, they want a hand up.

I wish you all the best of luck out there.

Jay S. Jump
Jump Law Group
Kent, WA
www.jumplawgroup.com