The lie about the unemployment rate is that you can exhaust your unemployment benefits and when you exhaust your unemployment benefits you stop reporting that you are unemployed. You haven’t “stopped looking”, you just can’t get paid anymore not to have a job so you stop reporting to the government that you are looking for work. So the 7.8% (now down to 7.4% because of summer jobs) isn’t even the percent looking for work. It’s the percent who are out of work and still filing for unemployment benefits.
When the economy “recovered”, certain states could no longer offer the federal unemployment extensions so those people were dropped.
Now, some of these people are “chronically unemployed” because they are just people no employer would want (addicts, sex offenders, folks with AIDS, etc) but some are people I have met that can’t move elsewhere and there just aren’t any workable jobs for them. They’ve exhausted their benefits and they are probably living with somebody else who earns money until they can get back on their feet.
They don’t count on the 7.8% because they’ve euphemistically “given up looking”.
“They don’t count on the 7.8% because they’ve euphemistically “given up looking”.”
I know, go to shadow stats (http://www.shadowstats.com/) and get a much more realistic perspective on what is going on. I think it’s worse, as many people are losing their full time status and are being made part time due to the glorious exalted god of the state and his genius health care curse, which the employed special statists do not have to participate in.