Since today is Thursday, it's time once again for the announcement of new unemployment claims filed last week. The number came in at 2.4 million new claims. That's bad, but we just don't know how bad. One thing we do know is that it isn't as bad as the media keeps saying. Pay attention and listen to how many times today you hear that this brings the number of unemployed to 38 million people. That's the total of all the unemployment claims filed since the start of the virus and its impact. It's a staggering number and an indicator of a great deal of human suffering. It's also completely misleading. Here's why:
1. A minority of the news reports will mention that there were also 25 million continuing unemployment claims. That's the number of people who stayed on unemployment from the previous week. To get the approximate total of those unemployed, one has to add the 25 million continuing unemployed to the 2.4 who filed new claims. That's 27.4 million people. That's more than ten million people fewer than the 38 million people that the media keeps pushing. You see, many of those who filed a claim went back to work.
2. It's also important to remember that prior to the start of the virus era, there were about 4 million people who were on continuing unemployment. Those people didn't find work, but they are not new claims due to the virus. That brings the 27.4 million figure down to roughly 23.4 million total unemployed due to the virus. Now we're almost 15 million fewer than the figure in the media.
3. Then there's the timing question. Because of the incompetence of the state unemployment systems, we can't tell how many of the claims of the past week were actually new and how many are claims filed for previous weeks for which the state was finally able to process. There are people all over the country who still haven't received payments for their unemployment claims. In many states, there were long delays while the state system was modified to allow people like gig workers to file claims. While this problem is being remedied, we still have to wonder how many of the recent claims were actually for a period starting weeks ago and how many were truly new claims. Estimates that I've seen say that there are at least two million people who still can't even file claims because of the chaos in the state systems.
There's no question that the problem with unemployment is huge. That's still no excuse for the media to report numbers that overstates the number of unemployed by something in the area of 17 million people. It's not that hard to analyze this problem. Surely, somebody in the media ought to be able to do it. But they just don't.
1. A minority of the news reports will mention that there were also 25 million continuing unemployment claims. That's the number of people who stayed on unemployment from the previous week. To get the approximate total of those unemployed, one has to add the 25 million continuing unemployed to the 2.4 who filed new claims. That's 27.4 million people. That's more than ten million people fewer than the 38 million people that the media keeps pushing. You see, many of those who filed a claim went back to work.
2. It's also important to remember that prior to the start of the virus era, there were about 4 million people who were on continuing unemployment. Those people didn't find work, but they are not new claims due to the virus. That brings the 27.4 million figure down to roughly 23.4 million total unemployed due to the virus. Now we're almost 15 million fewer than the figure in the media.
3. Then there's the timing question. Because of the incompetence of the state unemployment systems, we can't tell how many of the claims of the past week were actually new and how many are claims filed for previous weeks for which the state was finally able to process. There are people all over the country who still haven't received payments for their unemployment claims. In many states, there were long delays while the state system was modified to allow people like gig workers to file claims. While this problem is being remedied, we still have to wonder how many of the recent claims were actually for a period starting weeks ago and how many were truly new claims. Estimates that I've seen say that there are at least two million people who still can't even file claims because of the chaos in the state systems.
There's no question that the problem with unemployment is huge. That's still no excuse for the media to report numbers that overstates the number of unemployed by something in the area of 17 million people. It's not that hard to analyze this problem. Surely, somebody in the media ought to be able to do it. But they just don't.
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