You know, sometimes people just make things up, out of thin air, just to mislead folks...for the sake of clarity, we'll refer to it from this point forward as "lying."

I get a newsletter from The Career News every now and then. I think I must have signed up for this a few years ago at UGA, no clue really, but that's another story. This week's letter contained the following information:

"Wanting a job but not actively looking takes a person out of the unemployment rate calculation. In response to recurring questions about the unemployment rate, the Labor Department has created other indicators that paint a fuller portrait of the employment market. One of those measures, sometimes called an underemployment rate, adds two groups to those officially deemed unemployed:

• 'Marginally attached' workers, the Labor Department's term for people who have personal issues that interfere with the search, including discouraged jobseekers;
  
• People working part time because they couldn't find full-time jobs or had scaled-back hours.
  

In August, when the official unemployment rate fell 0.1 percentage point to 5.4 percent, this alternative index remained at 9.5 percent -- right where it had been the previous month. Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said this underemployment rate more accurately reflects the weakness in the job market."

Discouraged job seekers? Discouraged? Since when is that an excuse for not getting a job? Since when is that an excuse for anything? Seriously, deal with your feelings, then get a job. Man, it is so easy for any of us to blame our problems on someone else. People like this Economic Policy Institute and other masters of political correctness only make it easier for people to point that finger somewhere else besides themselves.

But seriously, the worst one of those two points is that they actually count people working part-time as UNEMPLOYED. That includes (though unfortunately not detailed in this document) people aged 18-22, people who, traditionally, either have NO job, or a part-time job - which, as it turns out, also means "unemployed." Does anyone else think it's strange that they can refer to anyone who is EMPLOYED as part of the UNEMPLOYMENT figures? The folks putting this out are either 1) ignorant, 2) illiterate or 3) flat-out lying to us.

Look folks, I understand that personal issues do prevent people from getting the job they want or getting a job at all, and I certainly hope that they get a good job sooner rather than later...but if you have a job, you're NOT unemployed, simply by definition.

Additionally, how is it that "wanting a job" but not having a job counts you as employed? And how do you know anyway? I guess you just take their word for it. I don't know, I guess it's somewhat reasonable, but it sure doesn't make sense.
For people who NEED a job, here's the short of it: if you have no job, then your job is to FIND a job. I sure think that's fair to assume.