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The reason the official unemployment rate is so much lower is because it ignores people who are disabled, in prison, or unemployed but not looking for work. While I agree they are not in the labor force, it is nondebatable that they do exist and require resources.
Unemployment rate is based only on people that are unemployed, but ready willing and able to work, while actively seeking employment. The reason they ignore disabled, prisoners, and people not looking for work, is they are not either employed or seeking work. They have nothing to do with unemployment rate.
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No, I said labor force participation rate, which is the ratio of the labor force to the total population. Retirees are not in the labor force but they are in the population. That is why the figure goes down when people retire.
You are wrong. Retirees are not counted in the labor force participation rate. As are permanently disabled unable to work are not included nor are many others. The labor force participation rate, does not include people who are not in the labor force as your examples, or do not want to be employed.
Before you throw around facts such as you are, you need to know what you are talking about. This short article, explains it very much so you can find out who is included and who is not in the labor force participation rate.
The problem is that Americans have always been disdainful of "unskilled labor" going back long before there were "burger flippers". It's why colonial landowners resorted to indentured servants and then slaves. Even after the end of slavery, blacks provided a virtually captive cheap workforce in the South while immigrants provided the cheap workforce in the North and the West. During the Great Depression, "Okies" and other migrants from the Dust Bowl provided cheap labor for California farmers/ranchers. After WW II, you had large scale migration of both poor whites and blacks into Northern and Midwestern industrial cities to do the crappy jobs that unionized American born whites wouldn't do. Until the 1960s, US immigration policy allowed unrestricted immigration from the Western Hemisphere because those immigrants were needed to do the field work on US farms. The reason there's so much illegal immigration today is because Americans won't do the crappy jobs that immigrants will do, and legal immigration favors the well educated and the skilled or their families. Poor people "yearning to breathe free" (and make a living) have to sneak in to do jobs that need doing. If these jobs were filled with Americans, there wouldn't be millions of "illegals" here in the US, but Americans won't do them. They have never wanted to do them, so employers have had to look elsewhere.
I was fascinated to learn there was a lot of wage regulation in early America, even back to colonial times.
How many people do you know who are homemakers? I don't know of anyone.
I will continue my research to find numbers for the people in the 26% who aren't in the government propaganda 5% unemployed, broken out by category. If someone else has the numbers handy, please post them here. Thanks!
Americans are angry and their anger is manifesting in the primary campaign in which establishment candidates are having their heads handed to them. It's not just the number of unemployed, which is huge, but the low paying service jobs that are left over. The U.S. had basically becomes warehouse stock boys for China and slaves to the Billionaires. People know this whatever the government propaganda is fec to us by the Billionaire owned mass media.
Americans are angry and their anger is manifesting in
More likely is you are angry and like to pretend/hope everyone else feels the same. I get it, I mean if I was like you and foolishly put all my money in a savings account during a low interest rate big stock market return period I'd be frustrated and angry too. Maybe I'd do similar and try to blame everyone else and the system for my stupid choices, who knows.
The good news is rates look to be rising! You might get 0.4% next year instead of 0.1%. Get'em tiger!
More likely is you are angry and like to pretend/hope everyone else feels the same. I get it, I mean if I was like you and foolishly put all my money in a savings account during a low interest rate big stock market return period I'd be frustrated and angry too. Maybe I'd do similar and try to blame everyone else and the system for my stupid choices, who knows.
The good news is rates look to be rising! You might get 0.4% next year instead of 0.1%. Get'em tiger!
I think a lot of Republicans and some independents are angry that the results they expected from electing conservatives in 2010 and 2014 didn't translate into greater conservative effectiveness in Washington.
e.g. it took longer to get rid of Boehner than they had expected, then Paul Ryan turned out to be not the savior for whom they had hoped. It's the establishment GOP candidates who are getting the wrath of voters this year, as the voters are tired of Business As Usual. Meanwhile Business As Usual is humming along in the Democratic Party.
26% of people in america is unemployed.
For me its acceptable, coz I know that most of them are unemployed not because
they cant find a job, but because they hate working for others and they are into business instead.
There are two problems. One, the decline of the work ethic. Two, the rise in cost of living.
A couple of generations back, a man could work in a factory, a retail store, or similar lower skill position yet support a stay at home wife and several children in a modest home with one car, one television, etc. The classic post-War American Dream. Today, not so much.
It's also much harder to find people willing to do hard physical labor or menial work than previously. Only the immigrants want to do it.
The bottom 25% is just scraping by, with poor prospects. Even the middle 50%, what we call the middle class, is not doing too well.
I'm hoping we can reverse some of this by better education, perhaps through the Internet, and maybe a GOP government will come into power and roll back some of the excessive rules and regulations that have driven businesses overseas, and encourage more entrepreneurship and economic activity here at home, especially among the bottom 25%.
But I'm not holding my breath. If 40% of the country want socialism and don't believe in capitalism, we're lost.
The civilian labor force participation rate has dropped from about 66 1/2% in 2005 to 62 1/2% today. There is a long list of reasons why that happened. I'll list some:
* In the Great Recession, corporations trimmed an awful lot of deadwood. Those were unproductive, usually older workers who were both expensive and with obsolete job skills. An awful lot of those never re-entered the workforce. If they were married, they continued to sit on the sidelines since the only work they could get with their skill set and job history is low wage work.
* The "everybody is a unique snowflake" generation entering the labor force completely lacks the work ethic and 21st century job skills employers want to hire. Failed parenting. Failed school systems. Failed culture. The children of the Asian tiger parents are doing just fine. Junior is still sitting on his parents sofa playing video games and Junior's parents continue to enable it.
* The impact of automation.
* The impact of global competition.
* The permanent underclass problem. If you don't speak "American business English", can't write a coherent paragraph, can't perform even basic arithmetic, and you popped out 2 or 3 children by 2 or 3 different daddies, you're not going to get yourself onto a career track. Basically, we've written off the bottom 20% of the population as being unemployable.
This is very true from my observation and understanding as of lately. I know someone who works on Wall Street had has a degree from a 2 year Community College. His positon now requires someone that has a masters or a 4 year degree from a top institution like an Ivy League or Stanford. The Great Recession put scores of mediocre workers, with mediocre work skills, mediocre education on the sidelines for good. THis is what I'm viewing out here in NYC. I never seen so much fallout out of private sector with scores of people trying to get into Civil positions. Places where elitism, affluence and influence runs high like in Boston, DC, SF and NYC, one must evaluate if this place is for him or her and whether or not if they are marketable in certain economies of certain regions.
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