Back then, the official unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today it's 5.3 percent - a very healthy looking rate for an economy that is supposedly on the rebound.
One of the bogus aspects raised by Clifton in his opinion piece about how the U.S. government calculates the unemployment rate was this:
"Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%."Even for a government hell bent on putting the best possible spin on overcoming the Wall Street train wreck of 2008, which brought on the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, characterizing someone working one hour a week in a lawn job as "employed" seems like the height of duplicity. We decided to check it out.
We went directly to the source: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Federal agency that calculates who is employed and who is not. According to the BLS, the bogus nature of who is counted as "employed," is even worse than Clifton suggests. Not only is a person counted as employed if they are working one hour a week in a lawn job paying $20, but a worker who makes no money at all donating his or her services to a family business for 15 hours or more per week is also considered employed.
Throughout the rest of America, one's donation of services typically defines one as a volunteer not an employed worker; but the BLS doesn't see it that way.
Read the rest of the article here.
the bigger difference is between U.3 and U.6 unemployment indicators, the latter being double the previous indicator, which is the only one reported in the mainstream media, which still commands the attention of the majority, though that is mostly over 55, same as all those part time jobs being granted in our economy these days, it's not just immigrants, but senior citizens that need to take part time jobs to compensate for the loss of earned interest on their savings, which is all being stolen out in the open by the Fed and its banking group around the Western world and beyond. All of this is a end-game scenario that won't last much longer... be it a few weeks or a few months.