Jobless Rate Is Still Climbing

Yesterday, the U.S. Labor Department released the unemployment statistics for the month of February. They don't look good. The national unemployment rate has now climbed to 8.1%, and most economists expect it to top 10% before the end of the year.

In January, there were four states that had already topped 10% in unemployment. There are now seven states with double-digit unemployment. A couple of those states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, have even reached record-setting unemployment levels. They are:

Michigan..........12%
South Carolina..........11%
Oregon..........10.8%
North Carolina..........10.7%
California..........10.5%
Rhode Island..........10.5%
Nevada..........10.1%

There was only one state that did not show an increase in unemployment last month -- Nebraska. All of the other 49 states and the District of Columbia had higher unemployment numbers in February than they had in January.

Things are not looking any better for March either. In the third week of March, over 652,000 new people made a claim for jobless benefits. This shows a rise from 644,000 the previous week. It was also the 10th week in a row that new claims for jobless benefits rose.

Some of the brainless talking-heads on major television media have been wondering if the economy is turning around. They base this on the rise in the stock market figures recently. Frankly, the only thing the stock market shows us is how many people are willing to gamble with their money -- not how well the economy is doing.

As long as new claims for jobless benefits keep rising and the national unemployment figure keeps going up, then the economy is not improving. I won't believe we've turned the corner on the economy until both of those figures start going down, and it looks like it may be a while before that happens.