Observe the AP spinmeisters explaining how a more than 5% rise in unemployment is not a rise in unemployment:
More Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, but the broader trend in layoffs points to a slowly healing job market.
The Labor Department says new claims for unemployment aid rose last week by a seasonally adjusted 26,000 to 436,000. The previous week’s claims were revised up slightly to show applications had tumbled by 31,000 to 410,000. The figures are often volatile during the weeks around the Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving holidays.
Oh, so it’s a “slowly healing job market”? Does that mean that unemployment figures are falling?
Even so, the longer-term trend has shown a downward drift.
Um—what?
The four-week moving average of claims, which smooths volatility, fell to 431,000 last week, a two-year low.
Oh, the average number of claims fell over the last four weeks. Well, that’s good, right?
Employers have been reluctant to ramp up hiring this year, even as the economy grows modestly.
The economy added 151,000 jobs in October, the first increase in total payrolls in five months. Private companies were responsible for all of the new jobs. But the increase in hiring still wasn’t strong enough to lower the unemployment rate, which has been stuck at 9.6 percent.
Uh-huh. So, unemployment is unchanged.
Overall, 8.9 million people are receiving jobless aid, including 4.9 million that are doing so through the federally funded extended benefit programs. Those provide up to 99 weeks of benefits.
Yep. Unchanged. And here’s another story that explains our current non-recovery better than the AP could. Charlie Brown’s is my all-time favorite restaurant chain. I started going to the one in Montclair when I was in college. If you wanted to have dinner there on Saturday night, you could expect a minimum 30-minute wait, which is why they developed call-ahead seating. It was busy much of the rest of the week as well. I was a bit worried the last time I was there, because it was a Saturday night and they weren’t that busy. I was right to be worried.
The New Jersey company that operates Charlie Brown Steakhouse restaurants announced today the closure of 20 restaurants, including 13 in New Jersey.
CB Holdings, based in Mountainside, said the New Jersey closures would include restaurants in Alpha, Blackwood, Clifton, Green Brook, Hackettstown, Highland Park, Hillsborough, Matawan, Montclair, Piscataway, South Brunswick, Tenafly and Union.
The company is also closing two Charlie Brown’s in New York and five in Pennsylvania. CB Holdings also announced the closure of 10 Bugaboo Creek Steak House locations in Atlanta and Massachusetts.
The closures would affect 1,400 employees throughout the company, according to a report on NorthJersey.com.
The company is citing higher food costs and the recession as it enters bankruptcy proceedings. And it couldn’t get enough credit to cover the nut during the bad times—partly due to the continuing reverberations of the economic meltdown of the last three years.
The 1,400 people in those 20 stores being shuttered may or may not be counted on the unemployment rolls in the above report, because they are waitstaff, kitchen staff, part-timers, college kids looking to pay their way through school, and probably some illegals working tables. And yet, another 1,400 people lost their jobs.
But the AP tells us that on the average, unemployment is falling. Kind of. Sort of. A little bit. Maybe. If you average things, and estimate this, and count that.
Yeah, that’s not gonna put food on these people’s tables.