>Jim,
>
>>Unemployment has been a story for months now. I'd have thought that any dents would have been the subject of BIG NEWS.
>
>I guess news organizations could set up their own system of tracking jobs and unemployment if they don't want to believe the official government numbers. (Those government numbers are always revised a few months later, BTW, as more accurate data or tardy reports are added to the mix, so it's not an easy task.)
>
>Many companies don't make public their hiring practices or statistics, so how would the media know that things were improving if not from the official government reporting mechanisms that they have been relying on and reporting on for years?
>
>I know it must be hard for some to accept that over 700,000 new jobs have been added since August last year, but those are the numbers (and no, that number is not being reported as consistently as the "2+ million jobs lost" phrase that is repeated so often).
>
>Why is the economic news so suspect when it is good news? I agree that the economy has a long way to go, but I'm seeing and hearing about lots of new development work going on and recent economic indicators are up consistently this year.
>
>I also laugh when I hear people use the argument that unemployement numbers can't be as low as they seem because they don't count those whose unemployment checks have run out. That has ALWAYS been the standard, and the low unemployment percentage was being called "low" when it was at this level during the prior administration. You don't hear 5.6 or 5.7 being called "low" today, do you?
>
>Some people just have to nit-pick away the good news to try to make the economy seem worse than it is -- for politcal purposes, of course.

David;

I think one thing that is different in my area when it comes to unemployment numbers is that IT professionals laid off are taking from 14-24 months to find a job. Few return to IT as there are few positions to fill. We also have a record number of house foreclosures, bankruptcies, divorces, and people moving out of the area in numbers never experienced before.

By the way they tell us that the number of IT jobs lost out here is 192,000. No one expects this to improve. They also tell us that over 90,000 people have moved out of San Jose.

Perhaps I will get my dream of California returning to 3.5 million people, as it was when I was born, instead of the 35 million we have today.

People in the rest of the nation must be doing all right and not have any of the problems we have. Such is life.

Tom