Why the Huffington Post Fails At Punking Trump on Unemployment

The Huffington Post recently tried to lambaste Donald Trump’s claim of 20% or more U.S. unemployment. In a recent video, HuffPo tried to portray Donald Trump as stumbling over the unemployment rate. But could he be right?

Since 2013,  20 percent of American families did not have a single person that is working in their household.

So what is the real unemployment rate, and how do we find it?

According to Donald Trump, its 20-40% and we aren’t being told the real unemployment numbers. The scary part is he just might be right! The government doesn’t actually count people who have stopped looking for work and people working part time as people looking for full time work.

A report released in 2014 seems to support Trump’s claim that we aren’t being told the true rate, as 1 in 4 American’s in their prime are out of work.  That’s 25% of people aged between 25-54 years old who are out of work.

Then again in 2014, another report was released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics .

So how is everyone surviving?

Well these unemployed people are depending on the government — Section 8, food stamps, people with various disabilities who get government checks for conditions, diseases, etc.

If you need financial help in the U.S. you turn to the government. These people can’t work, won’t work or can’t find work due to the economy. But whole households aren’t working? Can all these people have some type of medical condition and can’t find any form of work? Let’s be brutally honest – some people are just being lazy and mooching off the government.

 

“the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.”
~Tyler Durden ZER0HEDGE

 

According to a recent shocking poll an astronomical 59% of people who have been looking for work for 2 years or more say they have quit looking for work. That is the reason that the “official” unemployment rate has dropped – not because there are more jobs, but because people “exited the labor force” by ending their search for work.

If you take this and other factors into account, you can come up with a much higher unemployment rate than the government suggests. Trump’s 20-40% rate comes from using the Labor Force Participation rate (U-6) is on the monthly jobs report. This includes everyone over the age of 16 and up, and people who want jobs vs everyone else. But this number is calculated differently and has a wider scope.

This number includes – full time students, stay at home parents, the disabled and even people retired from the workforce. If we take the current Labor Force Participation rate for June –  62.6% – 100%- we are left with 37.4% of the available population who is not participating in the labor force. It’s simple math really.

In May, a Record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force . Keep in mind this is again defined by the stipulations above. So depending on how you want to get the rate Trump is correct the rates are higher then the standard shown U-3 rates. 

“The U-3 unemployment rate as a proxy for full employment does not even make it as primitive grade school economics”
~Former Reagan administration Budget Director, David Stockman

“Almost all of the decline that we’ve seen over the last decade or so is due to three factors: retiring baby boomers just leaving the labor force, college students getting more education than ever, and disability,”
Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at job placement site Glassdoor