Guess What? Unemployment's Really at 16.3 Percent

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Summary	Guess What? Unemployment's Really at 16.3 Percent
Category	Other
Subcategory	Jobs
New Health Idea	" ... How is it possible for the unemployment rate to essentially remain unchanged when 247,000 jobs have been lost? The reason is simple -- the number of people who stopped looking for work rose dramatically. Six hundred thirty-seven thousand additional people no longer consider themselves looking for work. This is by far the largest drop in the number of people who consider themselves in the labor force during the last year. -- It is almost twice the 358,000 increase in the people who left the labor force during June and almost four times the average monthly increase of 167,333 over the last year. Jobs are sufficiently scarce and the prospects of people finding them at wages that they are willing to work for so low that many individuals don't think that it is worth their time to even look for a job. ... If we include the normally counted number of unemployed as well as those who have recently given up looking for work and those who have taken a part-time low paying job because they can't find full-time work, the implication is that the unemployment rate for July would be at 16.3 percent These discouraged workers will again look for work once the economy starts to improve, but this 6.9 percentage point gap between publicly discussed unemployment rate and these discouraged workers is unusually large. ... "
Webpage	More info
Author	Editor
Date	8/8/2009