TheHill: A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims.
Should the government measure unemployment with Hunter's figure, the unemployment rate would be higher than the current rate of approximately 8 percent... His one-page legislation, the REAL Unemployment Calculation Act, would require “the federal government [to] cite, as its official unemployment calculation, the figure that takes into account those who are no longer looking for work,” not only those individuals actively seeking jobs.
For example, the most recent unemployment rate released on Friday, at 8.2 percent unemployment, would be officially considered 9.6 percent, the so-called U-5 rate that was also released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The measure would not require any additional numbers to be calculated; it would simply use a statistic that the BLS already calculates each month, alongside the so-called official unemployment rate and a handful of other stats.
The U-5 stat measures “total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force,” while the U-3 stat or the “official unemployment rate,” measures “total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”
I'll take some transparency and accuracy for a change, over the fraudulence of the reported number, as well as the administration and media propaganda behind the deception. But actually, the U6 is probably the most accurate!
