June 9th, 2008
Just Maybe
I saw this story on Friday and just had to do a little satire about it.
Aren’t we so fortunate to have the press to enlighten us to these subtle truths of modern living. We’d be so disconnected from reality without them. I mean really. A recession? Wow. Never would have guessed.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I read the article…this guy is a genius. “May was the fifth straight month in a row” slightly redundant statement there. and “the unemployment rate jumped because more people continued to lose jobs ” um yeah being unemployed usually means you don’t have a job so….
June 10th, 2008 at 10:48 am
you know the funny thing is that a healthy unemployment rate is around 4-6% in May the unemployment rate was 5.5%
there needs to be some unemployment, otherwise jobs are left unfilled. the lower the unemployment rate the tougher it is on businesses. thats something you learn in economics 101.
June 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Well it’s probably obvious that I’ve never worked toward getting an economics degree, but that sounds logical. The number of 8.5 million doesn’t really sound like a lot when you consider the population of the US, either. However, the article mentions the .5 percent jump which is the largest jump in that amount of time since 1986, so that’s substantial. Another statistic the media’s been throwing around is the jobless-for-6-months number, which has been high lately, but I can’t find a source for that particular statistic at the moment.
But mainly, I just thought the wording of the article was funny. I think there is a general perception that we’re in a recession right now. Costs of living are high, hiring freezes are in effect as this article states, companies are keeping strict watch on spending, layoffs and cutbacks are common, and the best clue of all, the government is using trickle-down to give us a boost. You know they hate to give away money. Of course it’s possible that this perception is just opinion and the facts on paper don’t support it, or that most of these problems only affect a select group of people in certain industries.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
i also read an interesting article a while back that talked about the tone of new articles before elections vs after elections. something like 90% of all news before an election was negative, but went to like 30% after. i’ll have to see if i can track that article down.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Oh I can totally believe that 90% of the news in this pre-election season is negative.
I can’t see much positive about it at all.