How Labor makes some workers disappear (Now, even U6 figures under-report joblessness)

New York Post ^ | 08/09/2012 | John Crudele

[SeekAndFind]

President Obama can thank Bill Clinton for the fact that the unemployment situation doesn’t look worse.

Thanks to a tiny tweak in definitions made by the Clinton White House back in 1994, Obama’s life is a whole lot easier.

Don’t get me wrong — not easy, just easier.

Last Friday, the Labor Department announced that the headline unemployment rate for July — the one followed in the newspapers — notched up one-tenth of a point to 8.3 percent. And the president is certainly going to have a hard time explaining why the jobless level is still so high.

But there’s another figure — called the U-6, buried deep in the Labor report — that should really be of concern to the president. And here’s where Clinton did all future presidents a favor: making the U-6 number look better than it really should.

U-6 is defined as “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.”

Are you clear on what this number is? Of course not — it’s gobbledygook.

It means that U-6 includes people out of work plus anyone who wants a full-time job, can’t find it and is settling for part-time work.

The unemployment rate in the U-6 definition rose to 15 percent in July from 14.9 percent in June. It had been 16.3 percent in July 2011.

But it’s those Americans not in the definition — discouraged workers — that you will want to know about.

[Roccus]

FTA;

The Clinton administration decided that unemployed people couldn’t be discouraged — and not job-hunting — for more than 12 months. If a person hadn’t searched for a year he was simply not included in the U-6 or other measures of joblessness.

In other words, if you are unemployed long enough, you are no longer unemployed.

[SeekAndFind]

I like how you get to the meat of the matter.

[Sgt_Schultze]

What of the addition of some 1.8 million suddenly employable (current illegals) who will be given work permits. Will the Labor Department add that new galaxy of potential employees into the universe of employable people?

What effect will that addition have to the reported unemployment rate?

[concerned about politics]

If a person hadn’t searched for a year he was simply not included in the U-6 or other measures of joblessness.

There's almost three whole years worth of laid off, discouraged workers not counted? That's a LOT of people.
Things are much worse than they appear. Then, there's a 1920's drought going on in the breadbasket. Food is going to skyrocket, gas is going up, people are still getting canned and it looks like things are going down hill fast.

Yeah - 4 more years of this crap ought to do the trick - that is if destroying America from within is the goal.

You know what Oboma will do after he loses the election and America is in chaos? He's going to go to the middle east ( to his newly formed caliphate - at U.S. taxpayer expense ) and "lead them to victory" in the name of Allah.