I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced recently that it would be changing the monthly survey it uses to estimate the various forms of unemployment to more accurately count the long-term unemployed. Unfortunately, that will not make the unemployment rate announced each month more accurate.
Noting an “unprecedented rise in the number of persons with very long durations of unemployment” over the last two years, the BLS announced:
Effective with data for January 2011, the Current Population Survey (CPS) will be modified to allow respondents to report longer durations of unemployment. Presently, the CPS accepts unemployment durations of up to 2 years; any response of unemployment duration greater than this is entered as 2 years. Starting with data for January 2011, respondents will be able to report unemployment durations of up to 5 years. This change will likely affect estimates of average (mean) duration of unemployment. The change will not affect the estimate of the number of unemployed persons and will not affect other data series on the duration of unemployment.
That last sentence is important. The unemployment rate announced by the BLS each month only includes those who are still receiving unemployment insurance benefits, which means that anyone whose benefits have expired is not counted in those figures. That makes the actual unemployment rate far higher than the rate the government announces — by millions of people in the current environment.
So the government recognizes the need to count the long-term unemployed for the purpose of statistics that no one pays attention to, but not for the purposes of the most important numbers they give the public.
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