But that’s where the fairy tale ends.
I also took the time to visit the community of El Centro, California. It’s down Interstate 8 from San Diego. In that town, headline unemployment is nearly 23%. Coming upon a church, I saw a line, winding around the block, of people simply wanting a hot meal.
This is the part of America the media is hiding. They don’t want to blemish President Obama. He feels people’s pain, so he can’t be responsible… right?
But the reality is that every Coronado, America has at least one El Centro.
If you dig deeper and calculate unemployment, adding those people standing in the food line who are unemployed, discouraged, and dropping out of the job search, the unemployment rate is 14.3%.
Economist John Williams counts those discouraged workers, and he says that national unemployment is 23%.
If this is the actual measure for all of America, we can only imagine what the true unemployment rate is in El Centro.
Digging Into the Numbers
Here are some different ways to look at it. The phony “official” unemployment rate peaked at 8.3%, and that was a 31-year high. It remained over 8% for 41 months, the worst record since the Great Depression.
There were 12.8 million people out of work at the peak of the Great Depression. There are currently 12.3 million out of work today. And only 58% of the population is working, the lowest since 1983. That means a record 100 million working-age Americans are unemployed.
Put differently, the actual rate of unemployment is two to three times the Bureau of Labor’s bullsh… I mean, statistics.
And the same is true about prices. The CPI is a crock of foul-smelling bologna.
John Williams believes that the manipulated rate of consumer inflation (CPI) – supposedly 1.6% – is actually 9.2%, as calculated by the official U.S. government methodology of 1990.
Why the disparity in the numbers? Put simply, the official methodology for calculating inflation has been manipulated.
The Cruel Reality
If I’ve learned one lesson in my 30 years of political activity and reporting, it’s that the government lies. A lot. Both parties are equally guilty, too.
And the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it. Today’s economic situation is no different.
With that in mind, I assure you this isn’t the last time I’m going to talk numbers. In fact, this is just the tip of the economic iceberg. So stay tuned.