This man is a qualified Personal Fitness Adviser but no gym will employ him
Pundits agree that The Federal Exchange(The Fed), the US equivalent of The bank Of England, no longer has any idea what it is doing, or where it is steering the American economy, as exemplified by the Chairwoman’s response that she has little “confidence” in the Fed’s current set of forecasts (because one can be wrong only for so long about the economy before one indeed loses all confidence in one’s abilities to say sooth and thus be the economy’s soothsayer). Apart from being clueless about what is happening in the economy the Fed has no idea how or why unemployment – as massaged as it may be courtesy of tens of millions of Americans dropping out of the labor force – is as high and as structural as it is.
It appears however there is something far more structural with America’s long-term unemployment problem, something not even the “smartest academics in the Harvard Business School room” can diagnose. Surprisingly, earlier today Gallup Research reported one factor that may be contributing to America’s unemployment malaise – the same problem that is the reason for the insolvent US welfare state coffers: obesity.
According to Gallup, Americans who have been out of work for a year or more are much more likely to be obese than those unemployed for a shorter time. The obesity rate rises from 22.8% among those unemployed for two weeks or less to 32.7% among those unemployed for 52 weeks or more.
Well I guess when you are too fat to wipe, there’s no chance of you holding down a job as a shelf stacker, still less a burger flipper. And as for walking fifteen miles a day as an order picker for Amazon, the less said the better.