Record Unemployment with Record Labor Shortage

• Author: Kelly Cooke
• Posted: 2024-11-24

This is an actual news headline that was posted by MSN this morning: "March unemployment rate hits record low amid [ongoing] labor shortage issues." Yes, you read that right. The news media is now quite literally admitting that America is dealing with record labor shortage issues, while simultaneously claiming unemployment is at a record low. How can these two things exist at the same time? The simple answer, they cannot. These are necessarily mutually exclusive propositions. You cannot have over 80% of America's businesses understaffed extremely, while also having more people employed than ever before. These things do not wash together in the same batch of clothing. Though when it comes to what America's mainstream media prints, facts never get in the way of a good story.

Why does the mainstream media continue to give false information about unemployment? Any potential answer would just be speculation; though by that same token, some speculation can certainly be based on historic observation to the point you can make an educated guess about what's really happening. These are corporate-owned media outlets, and the corporations that own these outlets were all recipients of huge money from the government during the COVID lock-downs, and perhaps even a lot earlier than that. This is not an issue of Republicans vs. Democrats. This is an issue of the Corporate-Government hybrid being entirely against the American people. That is not hyperbole. How else can they explain blatantly lying about people's livelihoods and the state of the economy?

You Can See the Issue

The weird thing here is that you can look at these headlines and tell that one of the points has to necessarily be false. If there are more people employed in America (percentage wise) than at any other point in history, there cannot be a huge labor shortage. And vice versa. Though the more people argue against this false narrative, the more they're pigeon-holed as wild-eyed, tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. Sites like Twitter are literally banning people's accounts if they point out that the government is using the rates of unemployment payments to claim that the unemployment rate is low. That's how important this narrative is.

Perhaps it's because America's politicians are coming up quickly on midterm elections, where hundreds of politicians spend billions of dollars to collectively hold onto their power. They want to look good for the voters, which is why they do strange things like cancelling Donald Trump's prescription drug price decreases, forcing Americans to pay more for insulin and other drugs, and then dangling lower drug prices as voting bait ahead of the midterms. It's abusive.

But Wait, That's Not All

The news media out of St. Louis, Missouri, has also thrown their hat into the ring to make the whole unemployment fiasco even more confusing. According to their Post-Dispatch, and other local papers, their cities are experiencing the highest unemployment rates ever recorded. So, of course, something has to give here. Which one is it? Is Joe Biden's economy doing so great that American unemployment is at a 54-year low? Or are there record labor shortages and over 10 million Americans who do not qualify for unemployment benefits?

Unfortunately for the American economy, the data suggests that the latter is true. There are millions upon millions of Americans who cannot draw unemployment. They have been denied at the state level, and the federal unemployment assistance has been cancelled for a while now. Either because they quit their jobs, or got fired with prejudice, or their "draw" has just ran out due to time; the unavoidable fact is that millions of Americans are unemployed now and desperately need a job or money but they cannot draw unemployment payments due to various reasons. In the old tactic of never allowing a good crisis to go to waste, the American government has decided to claim these people do not exist.

It really signals to a lot of people just how insanely political everything in America has become. This is not a healthy state of existence for anyone in the nation right now. Living such a divided political life that a human being is un-personed and not counted, only because it makes a government look better to ignore them, is something you might expect from Maoist China some decades ago. But, no, that's what's happening in the United States, right now, as of April 22.

When it's all said and done, the true numbers are going to eventually be released, and many Americans are going to wonder why their lives never mattered to politicians vying for political points.