The Donald would be closer to “correct”
Reality Check: What’s the Real Unemployment Rate in the U.S.?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3300876/posts
Based on income, I set the fully employed rate at 60%, and the marginally employed/unemployed rate at 40%. If we accept the BLS’s 121 million full-time jobs (which once again, this doesn’t make sense given even minimum wage full-time jobs earn $14,500, and 50 million people report earnings of less than $15,000), we still get a marginally employed/unemployed rate of 25%: work force of 160 million, 121 million fully employed.
STOCKMAN’S BEST OF THE WEEK, STOCKMAN’S CORNER
The Warren Buffett Economy——Why Its Days Are Numbered (Part 4)
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-warren-buffett-economy-why-its-days-are-numbered-part-4/
15JUN2015
(excerpt)
At the present time, there are 210 million adult Americans between the ages of 16 and 68—to take a plausible measure of the potential work force. That amounts to 420 billion potential labor hours, if we accept the convention that all adults are at least theoretically capable of holding a full-time job (2,000 hours/year) and pulling their share of society’s need for production and work effort.
By contrast, during 2014 only 240 billion hours were actually supplied to the US economy, according to the BLS estimates. Technically, therefore, there were 180 billion unemployed labor hours, meaning that the real unemployment rate was 42.9%, not 5.5%!