Free Republic

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, the unemployment rate, what is the latest reported unemployment, 5.5%, is that what it is, 5.3, 5.6? It's in that neighborhood, right? I don't know what the exact number is. Not that this matters to anything anymore. I mean, the truth is increasingly irrelevant. The truth is increasingly meaningless. In fact, there isn't any truth in way too much of the country. There is certainly no objective truth. Anyway, I have had, as you know if you listen regularly, I've had a lot of doubt about the accuracy of an unemployment rate of 5.5% when, at...

The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, dropped to 43.7% in August, from 44.6% in July, and is down from 45.3% in August 2012. Gallup's P2P metric estimates the percentage of the U.S. adult population aged 18 and older who are employed full time by an employer for at least 30 hours per week. P2P is not seasonally adjusted. August marks the seventh month this year that the P2P rate failed to improve over the same month in 2012. In fact, so far this year, P2P has declined an average of 0.3 percentage points in...

U.S. employers added just 88,000 jobs in March, the fewest in nine months and a sharp retreat after a period of strong hiring.

When did the BLS start reporting Unemployment using the U3 Tables? Was there a time when Unemployment was reported as just people out of work? (More like the U6 tables) I need to know for some stuff I am writing but I can't seem to find anything credible when I Google such. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

How would you define “unemployment?”  Statistics on unemployment are bandied around in the media all the time.  Changes in these statistics are hailed as good or bad news for the President, with varying degrees of emphasis from the news networks, depending on which party the President belongs to.  But what do these statistics truly measure?Would you define “unemployment” as measuring “people who want a job, but can’t get one?”  This is, broadly speaking, the definition embraced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The trick to making those numbers dance lies in measuring “people who want a job.”  The widely reported...