Saturday, October 11, 2014

Ken Braun: The real unemployment is much higher and most Americans know it

Ken Braun: The real unemployment is much higher and most Americans know it | MLive.com:
 The headline number released last week - 248,000 new jobs created during September - pales in comparison to the much larger exodus of job seekers from our labor force.
A similar result occurred in August: 203,000 new members of the adult population joined, while the labor force shrunk by 268,000.
The culprit is the rapidly declining labor force participation rate. 
Pre-recession, it was 66 percent of the adult population or higher, but has now been at 63 percent or lower for all but one month of the last year. 
Looking for the difference between those two numbers can obliterate the officially stated unemployment rate of 5.9 percent.
The Economic Policy Institute, a Left-leaning think tank supported by labor unions, has factored out the retirees and other demographic exits from the labor force and still comes up with more than 6.3 million “missing workers” not counted in the official unemployment statistics. 
EPI says honestly counting them as unemployed zips the real September unemployment rate up to 9.6 percent.
Where’d they go?

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