To be counted in Unemployment, you have to first be unemployed. I worked for myself through '07, netting under half my state's median income, in fact spurring the employment. This year I worked long enough to qualify for benefits when I got canned. I was lucky, my base year started when I started working for the company. Your weekly UC benefit will be a function of what you were making six months ago.

You contribute to UC insurance through a payroll deduction. Your Ice Cream Truck isn't subject to withholding, so your business won't pay for laid off employees, including you. Your employer pays almost all of it. Your hardship may be compounded if your former employer disputes your eligibility, since they'd have to pay for it. In their defense, they probably had to cut your job to shrink the company's obligations footprint. Tomorrow in am traffic, those of you who still go to work, look around at your peers in the work force. How many of them are paying for themselves? Poducing ANYTHING? Are you? It is coming.

To have a business, you have to be an owner of a company with an EIN, a federal tax ID. That's all. This could be your popcorn cart, ice cream truck, Molecular Biology Reagent Manufacturer, rock band, Microsoft. My company was a hobby I took pro when the last company I worked for shrank. That was unfortunately timed with many, many layoffs and closures across the Biotech R & D industry. My own enterprise hit rocks in late spring '07. I had customers and business, I sold my whole inventory, I tied up all the money shipping machines and traveling to install them. Nothing was paid for until I was behind in payments all over the place. And I did it. Hence, the job. I thought it prudent to wait until after tax time to close it, which qualifies it as a Sideline Business. 

You must be actively seeking new regular employment to be part of the labor market, whether receiving benefits or not. You might have time and energy to take a part-time job to make ends meet, but your earnings may be deducted from your benefit check. The money is supposed to be for bridging the gap between the job you had and your next one. The first time I was downsized, I used the money from a refi and my UC benefit to buy some time to incubate my business. While I was looking for a job I looked for capital, got some help with my business plan and set up terms with some vendors. Never got the business loan, but after six months I took a waiter job at a fine restaurant for cash while I launched the business full-time. UC lasted 26 weeks then, now it's extended.

Some news from the Job Market: It's crowded. Some recruiters are busy, but some are not. I look at the qualifications expected and rationalize ways I can claim them. I have no MBA, but I'm certainly qualified to run a marketing campaign based on my hands-on experience. I have no PhD, but I have teaching experience and over 20 years in the laboratory. But so does the other out-of-work or upward-mobile seeker. It would have been easier to get a job while I had a job the first time, but this time I'm selling experience to get a job qualified for me.

I admit doing voice exercises and making ridiculous faces in the mirror, plucking the odd eyebrow whisker and smiling into a camera for auditions. I actually made some money: $200, which will be deducted from my $130 benefit check. Oops. If I could get the tiniest encouragement for writing, I'd jump on it. But the arguments for any industry at all relate to opportunity risk. Acting is not a full-time job at first. I'm having a hard time writing every day, posting incomplete or weak or lifeless essays expecting to be the only one to see them anyway. So writing is not a full-time job at first. But like anything, they both require both feet.

So the Unemployment Rate. The Civilian Labor Force is 151,400,000 for 2006, 7 million unemployed. That's an awfully round number, an even hundred thousand? The other number, lucky 7 hides is differences between the jobs you left and the jobs you'd take to make ends meet. As soon as you start making regular payments to the tax man, or when you stop filing for UC benefits, you're employed. Imagine the dot com whiz kid who lost $85K and replaced it with a grocery store, Home Depot or Neighborhood Bank job. Think of the Bank Exec or Enron worker leaving a salary to cobble a livelihood from the Home Depot, the Grocery Store AND the local bank, since nothing was available with the hours to qualify for benefits...

US industries have invested millions in the labor market in just the years since that 7 million figure was published, contributing lots of people too. But how many more shops will CVS put in your neighborhood next year? They're going to have to use cash, by the way...  Now that the retail expansion has completed, to the extent where there's an Outback and a Starbucks within a local commute from Miami to Juneau, although idividuals may be using these jobs to bridge the gap to the next paying job, what sector can funnel the newly unemployed away from the poorhouse, and where are they going to go?

It's simple. Future Energy can absorb most technical or skilled workers right now, as the field of serious contenders is still pretty open. But we need people to do it with both feet, full time, at pay rates that allow households to sustain life.

We're all getting a pay cut, if you're the Presididit and don't read the memos. Presidential Daily Brief: The economy has already headed for a cliff, will hit, only option is minimizing losses and recovering quickly. So you may have to punch yet another hole in the belt you bought during a republican administration. If you needed to read that here you're not cognizant. But we include here. Once you've faced that inevitibility, the likelihood Chef Boy-ar-Dee products might not make it to shelves in your town, then the awesome hope of a technological revolution in energy should appear to you, starkly contrasted with Oil and Coal, which have already been grown to full size.

It's embarrassing to see Chief Executives, equally jowly and coiffed, lined up at the bench they've used as a trough for so long, being tortured by the geeks they may have bullied on the playground. Imagine it were any other industry: the Internet, Telecom, Aerospace, Fast Food. The news would read, "McDonald's CEO, citing more competition than it faced in the 1950s, demand suffering a lack of self, decades of stagnant product development, bloated costs of operation, increased demand for resources and a meltdown in commercial and consumer credit has slashed prices to stay in the game. Can they stay open until President Santa comes, despite selling their garbage-wrapped-in-garbage at a net loss?" "The Internet, facing accusations of unprofitability due to lack of material products to trade for money, announces layoffs," read the actual news. Many dollars vanished. It hurt. What's so special about these Three Big companies? Jobs are held by voters and generate tax revenue. Never mind that many of these jobs are held in Canada or Mexico, where taxes may be paid.

They don't want bankruptcy, which is the established method for protection from debtors when an insolvent company wants to stay in business. They've all said it, but now UAW president Gettelfinger says it too: "Bankruptcy is not a viable option." Consumers won't buy a car from a bankrupt company? I may lack sufficient objectivity here, but while I cheerfully bought seats on airplanes from bankrupt airlines, I wasn't worried about ten-year warranties or resale value, and I wasn't alone. Bankruptcy allowed the airlines to recover from industry-wide and economy-wide changes. Bankruptcy is awesome!

I am on the workers' side here. They got better at welding, while management didn't get better at doing business. But everybody's going to get hurt. They already are. That's the present.

Gettelfinger is right to protect his franchise's place, trying to keep seats at the table when It happens, whatever It is. And It doesn't look pretty from back this far. As you get closer to It, it might look like Michigan, which from over here in Mid-'lantic DelMarPA looks fine, if colder. Up close though, we learn that the cars aren't actually made there and the real estate isn't plunging anymore. Gravity only works until the bottom. Some cars are put together in the US, but in the Coal states, from parts brought in from around the globe. Japanese cars are being made right here in our homeland. The Big Three should have been preparing for the Big It ( the little car?).

So what are Gettelfinger, Wagoner, Mullaly and Nardelli protecting, and what would outright failure, bankruptcy or government takeover would look like? They're protecting their houses and the lifestyle their advanced placement afford them, which is perfectly appropriate. But they act like they hold us- you and me, hostage; as if we have the ransom they demand, as if we would be personally affected by the closure of Pontiac or Oldsmobile. Oops- Olds is already gone (So gone that it got caught by spell-check!).

Braying about the loss of jobs we'd face, GM's Wagoner begged the senate to look at what they've done as Toyota became the vanguard of automotive change. They've already cut their work force in half, and they'll do it again to get the bailout. So jobs get protection so they can be shed after the bailout. Jobs argument doesn't wash. This may be a management technique to save some of the pain for later. Show improvement in this quarter, and then have some left to trim from expenses in the next quarter. Such sustained improvement would be a windfall to people who are paid in stock, which typically fluctuates quarterly with P/L.

Run down the line, and you see parts suppliers and assembly plants offshoring, with NAFTA covering their emigration to Mexico or Canada. Dealers know what's happening- no money for buyers means no bill of sale. Of course we'll see closures, if not a remarkable downsizing. If they can't buy new, and if the parts companies are going down, then it is tautologous that the existing fleet will have to last longer. Even gas stations will suffer- we must turn away from gasoline. Growth can only come to the aftermarket or the gray market, as people keep their cars longer and buy used or reconditioned parts, or else in an industry to spring up beside or within the Feed-the-Oil-People industry.

The hard part seems to be getting these old people on the Hill and the vested interests appearing before them to take a hard look at the future, and the obstacle seems to be a properly rigorous study of the present. I want to write about unemployment, but this post is meant to debunk the jobs argument of the Big Three. The Big Three are no guarantee of employment in the future. They haven't been guaranteeing job growth, they're been guaranteeing shrinkage. That's the opposite. Stop arguing about saving jobs in dying industries, and start looking to the future for growth.