I've been thinking over the weekend about those U-3 unemployment numbers that the Obama Administration's Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday and how to put these calculations in their proper perspective to understand exactly what we're being sold.
Here's what they're telling us: unemployment is at 7.5% (11.7 million people).
To make the ratios easier to calculate, I'm using 100 individuals to represent the labor force, which is currently at 58.6%, or 185 million, of the total population (which is approx. 316 million).
That means that 41.4%, or roughly 131 million, of the U.S. population are not working. Of course, that includes children 17-under (which make up the majority of that number at over 76 million), the disabled (including those drawing as such), the retired, etc., so we must keep that in mind. However, something's still fishy about the math that the BLS is spitting out.
The drop in the U-3 or nominal unemployment rate to 7.5% is one tenth of a point from March, while the U-6 total unemployed rate actually rose a tenth of a point in April to 13.9%. Yes, the 165,000 job growth figure beat expectations, but as Ed Morrissey at HotAir states, "Beating expectations is not the same as a good jobs report. This one is a treading-water report, nothing more, and the revisions to March only move it up from poor to stagnation." I think it may be even more dire than that.
So to give you a realistic picture of where our work force vs. total population currently resides, you must also consider the 7.9 million part-time workers, along with the 2.3 million 'marginally attached' who are not counted because they've been unemployed in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Finally, add the percentage of non-working Americans, and this doesn't paint a pretty economic picture at all...which is why the administration, along with the press, don't want to portray the dire truth of the matter...
(maroon indicates part-time; gray indicates marginally attached plus total non-working population)
Additional resources: Unemployment 101
