PHONY UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES? My entry Monday on the Cleveland unemployment rate drew an email response from George Zeller, the research director of the Council on Economic Opportunities of Greater Cleveland (CEOGC). George knows his stuff, so here's most of his message:

First, the unemployment rates that you mention are phony, and they therefore do not deserve the coverage that you are complaining about...

Second, we do have some honest figures up on the CEOGC web site. One of them shows that Cuyahoga County has lost more than 5% of all its jobs during the past two years. Another way to look at that is that Cuyahoga County has 14.7% of Ohio's jobs, but it has suffered 24.3% of Ohio's job losses during the past two years.

http://www.ceogc.org/research/index.htm

Further, also on the web site is a comparison between local job growth and cash welfare cuts in all 88 Ohio counties. For every quarter during the last two years, the biggest discrepancy between job growth and welfare cuts in Ohio has been in Cuyahoga County. The gap between the two figures has exceeded 18,000 during every quarter of the last two years. The welfare cuts are continuing every quarter, despite large local job losses in those same quarters...

George

This led to an exchange in which George ended up explaining in great detail why the State's employment and unemployment figures are bogus, why there's no workaround available for us to get better numbers, and what related indicators are honest and reliable. I can't print it all here but I'm going to post the whole exchange on my Cleveland Wages Pages website in a day or two.

Meanwhile I highly recommend a visit to the CEOGC page linked above, where you'll find lots of data supporting the real point I was trying to make -- that the city has been experiencing a wrenching level of job loss for many months. Which, for some reason, is not seen as front-page news to those who decide these things.