If you use data from John Williams’s Shadow Government Statistics then you could contend that the real unemployment rate in the United States is above 20 percent. This is much higher than the government touted five percent.
You could take it one step further with the labor force participation rate, which stands around 63 percent. These statistics have many people arguing that, even with a lot of money printing from the Federal Reserve and government stimulus initiatives, the U.S. economy hasn’t fully recovered from the economic collapse.
So it’s no surprise that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump isn’t really buying official government numbers about the jobless rate.
The real estate billionaire mogul told the New York Post this week that you’re a “dummy” if you really believe the Labor Department’s five percent number. Trump also promised to investigate government economic statistics – the methodology of calculating unemployment and other things has been widely changed since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.
“When you look at some of these [economic] numbers they give out and then you go out and see people dying to get a job all over the country, I mean, it’s not jibing with what’s really going on,” Trump told the newspaper. “The economy is not doing well.”
Trump believes in the concept that the official unemployment rate is purposely reduced by the government by removing several factors. A couple of them include excluding those who have quit looking for work, those who are working part-time or those who have just exited the labor force and have entered into retirement.
The newspaper also alludes to the U-6 Unemployment Rate, which does include some of these factors. The U-6 pegs unemployment at around 10 percent.
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