I agree with Nick Ozment

“Jobless recovery?” Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

It sure does to working folks like you and me. Those two words really illustrate our government’s priorities: we are “recovering” as long as Wall Street corporations are doing better. To all those jobless people, it doesn’t look like much of a recovery.

Government numbers can be very misleading. Why has inflation barely moved these past four years? The inflation number the Federal Reserve reports does not include food or gas costs. That number is only relevant to Wall Street corporations—which indicates who our government really serves, doesn’t it? For the rest of us, the number is practically meaningless. Do you use gas? Do you eat? You know that those costs have gone through the roof the past four years and soak up a much larger slice of your dwindling budget! But who’s your politician going to listen to: you, or the corporations that funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into their campaign war chests?

How about the current jobless rate of 9.7%? Politicians say, “Well, at least we’re nowhere near the 23% of the Great Depression.” Well, ummm… If that number is calculated the way it was during the Depression, it comes to 19% (which includes people who have given up and are no longer actively searching, as well as people who want to work full-time but can only get part-time employment). If you don’t manipulate the numbers, our unemployment rate is right now close to what it was during the Depression. But of course we live in a reality now where people can, with a straight face, speak of a “jobless recovery”—which is only a recovery for people who are so rich they don’t need jobs.

Well said, Nick