On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:40:19 -0600, Moe DeLoughan
wrote:

On 2/16/2015 2:12 PM, Oren wrote:
On Mon, 16 Feb 2015 13:53:21 -0600, "ChairMan"
wrote:

Unemployment Explained

Gallup CEO: Jobless rate a 'big lie' created by White House


Gallup CEO: Labor Dept. numbers are misleading


Fortune Magazine: Is the unemployment rate really just a 'Big Lie'?

Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling service Gallup, wants to expose a
conspiracy theory so vast that it will indict not just the government,
but Wall Street and the media as well. These three entities have
worked in concert to prop up the “Big Lie” that America’s unemployment
rate is a mere 5.6%, as the Labor Department claims.

First, a little explainer on why the official unemployment rate, also
called U3, is compiled the way it is. The Labor Department releases
six different measures of unemployment, using different assumptions
for each one. The U1 rate, for instance, only counts people who have
been unemployed for less than six weeks, while the broadest measure,
U6, counts as unemployed folks who are working part time but wish to
be working full time. It also marks people who don’t have a job but
have looked for one in the past year (rather than four weeks as with
U3) as unemployed.

Why doesn’t the Labor Department just count all people without a job
as unemployed? Because it wants to distinguish between the truly
unemployed and those people who are, for instance, retired, or staying
home to take care of the house or family while a spouse works.
Counting these people as not part of the labor force is more accurate
than saying that they are unemployed.

In other words, the Labor Department has to make some distinctions to
present an accurate portrayal of the labor market. If you simply want
to know what percentage of the population has a job versus those that
don’t, there is a statistic for that too. It’s called the
employment-to-population ratio. But that number tends to rise and fall
for demographic and social reasons. It rose throughout the late 20th
century, as women began to join the labor force in large numbers. And
it is now trending downward, mostly because of the aging of the
population.

But focusing on this number won’t tell us how strong the labor market
is relative to, say, five years ago. That’s why we have to designate
some people as in the labor market and others as not. Some argue that
the U6, which counts the underemployed as unemployed is a better gauge
of the the labor market’s health. And they have a leg to stand on. But
if you’re trying to understand what percentage of the labor market
doesn’t have a job, counting people with part-time jobs as unemployed
would also be misleading.

Finally, for the unemployment rate to be a “Big Lie,” you’d have to
believe that human beings have an innate understanding of what
constitutes a good unemployment rate. Why is a 5.6% unemployment rate
good, anyway? That still means that millions of Americans are out of
work. We think it’s good because we lived through a period of 10%
unemployment not that long ago. And by any measure, U6 or U3, the job
market is better today than it was in 2009.

http://fortune.com/2015/02/04/unemployment-rate-gallup/

Also, what Gallup carefully failed to mention is that the BLS has
measured unemployment this way for decades. It is nothing new.

I'll defer to those that understand fuzzy math.

The odd thing is that when large numbers are placed on disability, say
due to anxiety or such, under the administration, they are removed
from the unemployment numbers?

Arithmetic is hard.