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As a practical question, how does the government count the people who are not receiving unemployment benefits? There are no people getting a check, so how do they keep track of people no longer in the system?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment in two ways. The Establishment Survey gathers data directly from 400,000 companies and then estimates how many Americans have payroll jobs. The Household Survey, based on surveys of 60,000 households, determines how many people are working and produces the unemployment rate.

Don't worry, Toddy & rude will show up in a while to tell me I'm stupid...

There are no people getting a check, so how do they keep track of people no longer in the system?

The same way they track people every month to calculate the unemployment rate. Pretty sure there's link upthread.

It does a monthly “Household Survey” of about 60,000 homes.

From that survey, and from other data like unemployment claims, the government estimates the total number of people working and the total number not working BUT looking for work.

They compute the “unemployment rate” based on those two numbers.

As a practical question, how does the government count the people who are not receiving unemployment benefits? There are no people getting a check, so how do they keep track of people no longer in the system?

Please check the link to the FAQ's I posted in my #13, that started the parade of my admirers.

I'm not going to let a bunch of loud-mouths keep me from helping you to understand that unemployment compensation has nothing to do with the calculation of the unemployment rate. And to summarize, it's because not everyone is eligible for it.

So, if you are looking for a statistical snapshot of the population, in order to be scientifically valid you cannot limit the population you survey in that way (again, for reasons the BLS discusses in #13).

Well, you always could, but you would introduce bias. Now, that is completely a separate issue from the other ways that the BLS introduces bias into the calculation of the unemployment rate. But you shouldn't complain about oranges by talking about apples.