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The other key is full time employment. We're down 2.3MM full time jobs in the last 18 months, 2MM of which are private sector jobs too. The unemployment numbers in total are a mirage since part time jobs replaced these lost full time jobs.
All I'm reading from this is that if you have a job. Keep it.
For a brief time during the second half of Trump 1 and throughout the entire Biden administration, even taking into account the Trump/COVID economic crash, workers had an incredible amount of leverage. Corporate media was so pissed at this that they pushed a nonsensical, bullshit claim that $600 one-time checks kept people home because they didn't need a job. Not because it was true, but because they hated how much leverage regular, every day Americans had.
Trump 2 destroyed that in 18 months. Fuck every last breathing soul who supports this admin and other Republican filth. Because of these trash, low life, anti-American right wing thugs, your economic freedom is under attack. Your outlook is worse. Your kids' outlook is worse. Your grandkids' outlook is worse. All it took to make that happen was 18 months of Republicans having control over all three branches of government.
Most of that brief power during COVID recovery was from companies trying to game the PPP loan system to get free money.
I wouldn't exactly claim corporate media was angry at the $600, more like they wanted as many people taking the made-up jobs companies were posting for the PPP loans so their masters could make lots of money from the government hand-outs.
We're living in probably the greatest period of graft in the US's history at this point.
Should not underestimate the power of the virus, though. Even I, as a lowly food service essential worker, had so much more power at work. They did not dare remove, at least publicly, safety regulations or sick pay. But they forced return to normality to get rid of that power, too.
“ most of that was companies trying to game the free PPP loan system”
That’s a bit of a stretch, they already did a review on that and found about 8% to be worthy of being considered fraudulent. That means 92% were probably legit.
The term "fraudulent" meaning they broke the law in attaining them.
There was a significant percentage of companies that followed the law but abused it's language to take out more PPP loans than they needed.
They did this by posting for jobs either with very easy requirements with intent to hire for unnecessary work and short-changing the employee hired (keeping the difference through accounting tricks or exemptions in the law) or incredibly particular requirements without intent to hire in order to pass a check in an amendment to the law that allowed keeping the loan if a job role could not be filled because the talent was not available (keeping all of it).
So, while that review may be correct in it's assessment of fraudulent loans, it is not including the amount of graft that operated within the definitions of the law and are unlikely to lead to prosecutions.
My mother ran a recruiting firm for CPAs in addition to being a former CPA herself. I moved back home during Covid and remember the look of genuine concern on her face when she got off the phone after securing a PPP loan for her company.
First thing she said was “they are never going to know where any of this money went.” She had prepared copious amounts of documentation covering all the details of her company and why they qualified for the amount she was seeking. They didn’t ask for any of it. Wild.
My org received a forgiven PPP loan. I brought binders of records to the bank, but the loan officer hardly looked at them. In fact, he thought the amount I was requesting was a little low and gave me his best Matthew McConaughey "you've got to pump those numbers up" impression. I was shocked and would have been appalled... but I was getting a bunch of free money!
You have no idea how much money was gained legally but in the wrong amount pursuant to the needs of individual companies. I’m insulted at your insinuation that you have any inkling at all. Could have been another $100 billion, could have been $12. You have no idea.
It’s easily accessible info from the department of treasuries own investigation mandate from congress so…. Here’s a quick source quoting the numbers from investigation:
For context, Obama added 9tr over two terms and Biden added 8tr over one term. They had unique issues with the financial crash and Covid, but this is obviously a bipartisan American addiction to debt.
Nah, this is revisionism. The conditions you are referring to were unique to the period early 2021-early 2023, with the seasonally-adjusted quits rate having returned to its pre-pandemic baseline of 2.3% by April 2023 before beginning a downward slide in December of that year, finally bottoming out at 1.9% in November 2024 (which is tied for the lowest of the post-pandemic period). The labor market has been ass for nearly 3.5 years at this point.
Correct. I recall 2023 being the beginning of the tough times while frequent commenters here denying the reports and stating that inflation was transitory and okay.
And this is also a contributing reason to sinking the Biden/Harris campaign. You can't sit there and say the economy is fine when real world people know it's not true. Even if certain spreadsheets and such say so.
Yeah, and while they denied the experience of the average person they crowed about their "BIDENOMICS!" as the future of their campaign. If mass layoffs, outsourcing, combined with high prices and high inflation were the things being championed, then the conclusion was obvious.
The economy is more than the stock market. Our leaders should act like it.
The thing is, you don't just fix the historical levels of printing, the supply side disruptions, or global energy shocks that happened under both Trump and Biden overnight. Of course inflation spiked, it happened all over the globe. The US was still vastly better equipped to navigate the post-pandemic economy and ultimately recover when compared to every other western nation. The US experienced stronger real GDP growth, more rapid disinflation, and lower levels of unemployment when compared to every other G7 nation.
We were in the process of executing what Dalio calls "beautiful deleveraging", but the American public is apparently too impatient to persevere the unwinding of a mess decades in the making. That's why they ended up voting for the guy that promised to bring the good times back without any actual understanding of how exactly he would do so. We voted for tariff policy that has been definitively proven to be inflationary, rather than sticking with the inflationary and deflationary levers (combination of austerity, debt defaulting/restructuring, money printing, wealth redistribution) under Biden that, by the data, were working (albeit slowly).
There were cracks in every aspect of what you were saying. Obvious things that an interaction with the public would reveal, but instead there was a reliance upon the very metrics you claim that had them crowing for "BIDENOMICS" while mass layoffs were occurring, while financial programs were created for the corporations to ensure that stock valuations would remain high, even as inflation was eating at the value of wages.
Unemployment sure sounds low when following the Obama administration, we count someone taking a job as a gig worker just the same as a salaried person who was let go.
People love to point to the statistics that wage growth among the lowest quintile was the greatest without considering the fact that their household economics includes means-tested support programs that they no longer qualify for. Their income is greater, but their ability to make ends meet is curtailed.
It sure is convenient for the administration that we measure rent not directly but by asking homeowners what they think they might rent their place for; they're always underestimating what the market rate currently is.
Of course these sorts of concerns affect the average American, not the privileged college educated political establishment the Democratic party employs as staffers. Naturally, they could have a conversation with the people they claim to represent, but instead they've opted to look at these carefully selected numbers.
Biden has to deal with massive supply chain issues due to covid.
Biden's economy was the best in the world for the times. And under Trump, that economy has ground to a halt with pointless trade wars if the president's feelings are hurt.
Blaming Biden seems a bit rich here. He did the best he could do with a shitty hand.
It started under him, but was mostly attributed to him for no reason. He didn't cause the complete meltdown of supply chains, and one could argue that Trump 1 could have done a better job at maintaining supply chains, and Biden had nothing to do with the gasoline price spike.
Recently economists have attributed up to 50% of the Biden era inflation on price gouging from corporations who knew that we had saved up money as consumers. On top of it all, since the Iran war started it has been found that the OPEC countries had underreported 500 million barrels of oil, so the price spike when Russia invaded Ukraine was horseshit too.
Other countries who want to see us fail, and greedy corporations here definitely influence our elections with their pricing schemes. Break them all up. Bust the trusts.
Spot on. Working 2 or 3 part-time gig jobs just to afford groceries gets counted as "fully employed" in the headline numbers. It completely distorts reality
That’s me! Highly technical IT engineer who got laid off, went back to school to be able to deploy AI models and i can’t find work anywhere. Almost 3 years out. Now I’m licensed in insurance contracting with two different company’s for 100% commission (it’s still shit pay) and trying to get a startup off the ground so my tech skills don’t degrade into the ground. What a great fucking economy!
I still don’t know how much you make lol, it can’t literally be min wage because you said it’s commission. Are you saying the amount you make is equivalent to min wage? Which could be half in some states what it would be in others.. I was really just curious like what your paycheck and how often, and how many hours you’re working for it. Interested in doing this myself if other stuff doesn’t work out.
It averages out to minimum wage. I cannot not recommend insurance sales enough. It is a brutal, cut throat industry full of MLM scam style companies. The licensing takes a lot of time as well. I’d recommend doing anything else as a back up. There’s a good reason 93% of agents leave the field after the first year. The amount if scamming i see within my own org is ridiculous.
They don't publish full and part time by age. Net immigration is still positive 1.4-1.5MM, and there's no indication this is just boomers retiring. The population is still growing by 0.6-0.8% per year.
While I agree that it's not "just" boomers retiring, I think the retired population needs to be taken into account. We have not only a vastly larger number of retired persons than any time before, but more importantly also a higher percentage. This is due to the size of the baby boomer population, but also that they're living longer than prior generations too.
Not that I personally want this, but have health insurance work like other insurance: private companies that anyone can buy with heavy state regulation of pricing, benefits, terms, etc.
Yeah, I don’t get why I can’t buy policies offered in other states. My options are between two companies and in the last state I lived in I had only one option on the exchange.
You can have a system that offers generous ACA subsidies for people who really need it, like people without full time employment or people between jobs. We already have the marketplaces, we just need to expand the subsidies.
There's no need for a substitute. 4% is incredibly low for the standard unemployment rate, it's about as low as it would ever be. This "true rate of unemployment" would only be interesting if you could demonstrate that it doesn't generally move up and down with the official rate. But like, let's call this rate T, if T is 25% today, and U3 is 4%, and some months ago when T was 26% U3 was 5%, there's absolutely zero interesting information in T. T is literally just redefining "best possible" to be 25% instead of 4%. And it has the problematic side effect that it makes the difference between 25% and 30% seem much less terrible than the difference between 4% and 9%, when in fact the latter is a bigger deal.
> Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
I understand what they are trying to get at, but it doesn't feel like they are going about it the right way.
If a student (aged 16+) that is currently enrolled in school that has no desire for FT work and makes under $26,000 would be considered unemployed by their methodology.
This data might make sense if you wanted to look at the "health" for the economy, eg what jobs are being created /destroyed. For example if data showed an increase in TRU uneployment while the BLS data stayed flat or declined maybe something interesting or new could be teased out of the data.
But looking at the two data sets on one chart, the TRU rate is just 20 points +/- the BLS rate
Yes. Lots of people work part time by choice. Students, stay at home parents, retirees. All of them count as functionally unemployed by this metric and in fact based on other metrics likely make up most of the difference between official rates and this one.
Using a different way to measure unemployment is going to lead to different numbers, yes. Whether it's good or bad is debatable, but just splashing a big number up there without contextualizing whether this is historically high or low on its own terms is really meaningless.
Exactly. Incredibly annoying to see someone trot out some big horrible economic metric that is never normally used and act like it means the sky is falling but if you check it historically it's always been that way.
Something has been historically the same but now all of a sudden people are trotting it out like it is different - that is the problem. Without historical perspective it's a meaningless statistic.
It’s always difficult to square employment stats with sentiment, like the gloomy job related subs. Feels like a particularly perilous period for workers due to the combination of disruptive technology such as AI and a clown-led government.
If you look at the graph of this new measure, the past four years have been the best, lowest unemployment in US history, confirming some of the best job market periods ever.
What's LISEP's reputation among economists? This seems like a fairly heterodox but not completely bonkers way to measure the health of the labor market.
Their method of measuring unemployment (unemployment + underemployment + poverty wages) should really be called something else, but I can see it playing a useful corrective in contrast w/ the headline unemployment number.
How would these numbers compare with other OECD countries?
One thing to consider with any alternative measure is that you can't compare it against the standard U3. Idk what LISEP is but what is the all-time high and low to measure against this reading? The value in looking at U3 is we can make an apples to apples comparison over time and say when the rate is unusually high or unusually low. It is well known that it is not a comprehensive and it's not meant to be. It's an indicator. Actual policy makers will dig directly into dozens of data points and even the raw data when they need to. They don't just read the newspaper and react.
Does it tell us any information that the regular unemployment rate doesn’t? It looks like this rate moves up and down pretty much identically to the regular unemployment rate, and has been somewhat flat at a low level (lower than the entire 1995-2020 period) since mid-2021
Yes I agree that's the main question. If you're measuring something in a different way and getting the same pattern, what value do the additional data points add?
To me, it seems the goal is to present a more "real" picture of the health of the labor market. I haven't read the underlying 2020 paper but certainly the 25% number has a different impact than the 4% number, and I don't think it's necessarily misleading. I think it's meaningful that a quarter of the workforce isn't able to access full-time employment that brings them out of poverty. And I think it potentially guards against an artificially rosy unemployment figure by highlighting these other factors as well.
However, the lack of differentiation with the headline unemployment figure is a challenge. It's probably better to think of the three figures separately.
It would be better to look at the poverty rate directly. This is a metric that pretends to be a poverty rate but it's actually just the unemployment rate stated in a dishonest way.
> What's LISEP's reputation among economists? This seems like a fairly heterodox but not completely bonkers way to measure the health of the labor market
Prettymuch that it's a bullshit figure that really measures nothing of value. The core issue is that LISEP arbitrarily determines what "functionally employed" means and publishes that as if it's truth. One metric is just part of the BLS's labor under utilization reports - part time for economic reasons.
But the big disparity, and LISEP purposefully obscures this data, is that they also count anyone who makes less than ~$25k as functionally unemployed. What this does is creates massive upwards pressure from all sorts of purposefully part time individuals - teenagers working summer jobs, elderly people working one day a week for fun, stay at home spouses working some small hobby/philanthropic job, college students, etc.
They know this is the case too, which is why they don't publish demographic data on who falls in to that specific category of unemployed, as you'd see clear as day that it's heavily weighted to those demographics that work part time on purpose. LISEP claims to exclude purposefully part time individuals, yet puts them right back in the unemployed category with this income threshold.
> Their method of measuring unemployment (unemployment + underemployment + poverty wages) should really be called something else, but I can see it playing a useful corrective in contrast w/ the headline unemployment number.
It's called what it is because economists can already measure all of these things independently, so their data really holds no actual economic value, therefore it's named and engineered to gather clicks from people who don't know any better.
> How would these numbers compare with other OECD countries?
In terms of how many other OECD countries have individuals meeting similar wage criteria? The figures would be significantly higher. The US is the highest wage country by a massive margin. The poverty wage line indicated by LISEP is not far off from the median incomes in much of southern europe for example.
>But the big disparity, and LISEP purposefully obscures this data, is that they also count anyone who makes less than ~$25k as functionally unemployed. What this does is creates massive upwards pressure from all sorts of purposefully part time individuals - teenagers working summer jobs, elderly people working one day a week for fun, stay at home spouses working some small hobby/philanthropic job, college students, etc.
Per their methodology white paper, they compute a number of "TRU" variants to test how changing their classification criteria affects the final rates. One of those variants uses an hourly threshold (I believe $15/hour in 2020 dollars) instead of annualizing their weekly earnings. Their methodology specifically says they compare the outcomes of the $15/hour and $20,000/year variants to verify that the annual earnings threshold isn't just capturing people who chose to work a small number of hours in the reference week.
That still doesn't fully address your criticism, of course. Someone who doesn't need to earn a living wage might voluntarily choose a job that pays less but has some other benefit (flexibility, area of interest, etc). It seems misleading to call that person functional unemployed. But their annual income test isn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds.
I still question whether this metric is a useful or informative. And Ludwig himself is an attention-seeking hack, as his virally misleading Politico op-ed made clear.
The "true" unemployment is truly nonsense because it's just counting everyone without a job. So a billionaire with millions in passive would count as "unemployed" and someone with a chronic disease preventing them from working at all would count as unemployed, too. There is a reason we don't do this.
And it doesn't tell us anything different about the recovery, either. Because while the level might be different, the change really isn't. Meaning unemployment going up or down and "true" unemployment going up and down follow mostly the same patterns.
You can see that in the graph on their website, too:
To the best of my understanding all it's just adding an almost constant figure onto standard unemployment figures, making it seem worse in the eyes of (frankly, stupid) people who complain two different metrics to each other directly. Over time, this should parallel ordinary unemployment measures nearly perfectly.
In fairness to this so-called "TRU", it isn't just adding a constant onto BLS's own unemployment rates. The rate is derived from the household survey's public-use microdata (i.e. the anonymized responses from the same detailed interviews that the official unemployment statistics are based on). TRU just defines different criteria for what classifies a respondent as "unemployed".
This is not me defending TRU. I don't think it is particularly useful or informative.
But I bring up TRU's methodology because there is a different inflation-truther and unemployment-truther website run by a grifter who does literally just add a constant to the official BLS rates... and then sells subscriptions for the full set of his fake statistics.
And indeed it does mirror standard unemployment, so I agree - probably not adding much other than providing a larger number for political-rhetorical purposes
The problem with this is it's accuracy varies by how high the percentage is. If we assume the amount of millionaires not working and disabled is near static, then the "True Unemployment" becomes more representative of the greater population the larger the percentage is.
I would disagree with that assumption, however. The number of millionaires increases over time (both in terms of "actual millionaires" and "sit and live off income/principal people") and the disabled numbers are not at all static, both with more people becoming permanently disabled, but also you have the transiently disabled population (e.g. as someone who has cared for both my parents undergoing cancer treatment...I'd regard anyone undergoing cancer treatment as being at least temporarily disabled).
The exact equivalents to LISEP in say France and Germany aren't easy to find. But if I'm remembering correctly from earlier in the year it's like 21% and 19% respectively.
The UK is situated pretty much in the same area as the US.
Personally I think a graph over time is interesting. It doesn't change as much as I expected.
Lisep is widely considered disingenuous and is disregarded by most mainstream economists entirely. Its definition is incredibly broad and it isnt useful at displaying anything that other data meausures dont already display.
Its mostly an inflamatory way of contrarians pointing out "Hurr durr, unemployment high", and LISEP is policy advocacy group, not a neutral non-partisan statistical bureau or peer-reviewed academic journal.
Their angle is on their website - its advocacy and policy, not a true peer reviewed fact based metric economists would use
https://www.lisep.org/mission
Most reputable economists dont engage directly with policy advocacy groups, so you wont find many writing about them publicly unfortunately, but there is a reason it isnt a cited metric by any major economist outside of the twittersphere or reddit.
Again, there are more accurate and nuanced datasets that already illustrate the aspects that LISEP tries to point out - they have a goal they are trying to achieve.
100% of the time I see this posted on on reddit, especially less literate subs, the poster and the vast majority of people commenting have no idea what the statistic is actually saying, and I believe the org is intentionally misleading. As evidence for the intent, after the 2024 election they cited their "TRU unemployment rate" as vindicating the election of Donald Trump, even though that statistic was at an all-time historic low under Biden.
The real numbers are rather simple. Everyone I know, in my circle knows someone that’s been on long term unemployment. Educated people. People with experience. When you go buy groceries, you’re not buying certain products because you refuse to pay that price or you can’t afford that price.
Our Government over my 50 years has failed us. There’s no other way to asses it than failure. Every administration for the last 50 years has sold out to corporations. Every single one. Incremental has now turned into the lobbyists write the laws that get passed through contributions.
I hate headlines like this. It imposes some sort of meaning in relation to what we all understand to be the unemployment rate (the U-3). What is important to do with stuff like this is to look at the entire dataset over time in the context of everything.
Just like the U-6. Just like the U-3. This 24.9%, how they measure, is still historically pretty low.
There are ABSOLUTELY things to criticize in the jobs report and there are some bleak things, but jfc, lets not throw rage bait statistics out there that are meant to three card monty motherfuckers into believing a mirage.
Are you saying LISEP is being disingenous? This is the first time I've encountered this measure so I was curious to learn what the community thinks about this method. So far it seems the consensus is that it adds more noise than signal.
No. I am saying the headline is a bit disingenuous, not what they are measuring.
Yeah, it can be a good metric to watch. Without perspective and context, it sounds alarms that don’t need to be sounded. If you look at this metric over time, it is low.
LISEP counts anyone earning under $26,000 a year as "unfunctionally unemployed," even if they have a part-time job and are not looking for more work. I could have part time work, millions in net worth, and be functionally unemployed by their measure.
Uneducated leftist really love this statistic because it lets them ignore reality and assert their priors without actually learning anything on the topic, just like Trump supporters
No serious economist accept this made up definition
Even by this orgs own shoddy methodology, we are doing better than ever before
Economics-ModTeam | 2 hours ago
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jarena009 | 7 hours ago
The other key is full time employment. We're down 2.3MM full time jobs in the last 18 months, 2MM of which are private sector jobs too. The unemployment numbers in total are a mirage since part time jobs replaced these lost full time jobs.
[OP] [Deleted] | 7 hours ago
There was also this recent release on displaced workers: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/disp.nr0.htm
67.6% reemployment rate for displaced workers is a concerning figure
boeings_door_plug | 6 hours ago
All I'm reading from this is that if you have a job. Keep it.
For a brief time during the second half of Trump 1 and throughout the entire Biden administration, even taking into account the Trump/COVID economic crash, workers had an incredible amount of leverage. Corporate media was so pissed at this that they pushed a nonsensical, bullshit claim that $600 one-time checks kept people home because they didn't need a job. Not because it was true, but because they hated how much leverage regular, every day Americans had.
Trump 2 destroyed that in 18 months. Fuck every last breathing soul who supports this admin and other Republican filth. Because of these trash, low life, anti-American right wing thugs, your economic freedom is under attack. Your outlook is worse. Your kids' outlook is worse. Your grandkids' outlook is worse. All it took to make that happen was 18 months of Republicans having control over all three branches of government.
Mallissin | 6 hours ago
Most of that brief power during COVID recovery was from companies trying to game the PPP loan system to get free money.
I wouldn't exactly claim corporate media was angry at the $600, more like they wanted as many people taking the made-up jobs companies were posting for the PPP loans so their masters could make lots of money from the government hand-outs.
We're living in probably the greatest period of graft in the US's history at this point.
Lives_on_mars | 5 hours ago
Should not underestimate the power of the virus, though. Even I, as a lowly food service essential worker, had so much more power at work. They did not dare remove, at least publicly, safety regulations or sick pay. But they forced return to normality to get rid of that power, too.
KarmaticArmageddon | 3 hours ago
And then in places like Missouri (the shit-hole state I unfortunately live in), legislators removed the sick pay law that voters enacted.
But that only happened because a ton of the people who voted for that law also voted for the Republican politicians who eventually voted to repeal it.
Missourians are dumb as shit. It's infuriating.
Cptawesome23 | 5 hours ago
“ most of that was companies trying to game the free PPP loan system”
That’s a bit of a stretch, they already did a review on that and found about 8% to be worthy of being considered fraudulent. That means 92% were probably legit.
bobandgeorge | 5 hours ago
Do you have a source for that? I would very much like to see that study.
Cptawesome23 | an hour ago
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/springfield/news/how-the-fbi-is-combatting-covid-19-related-fraud
bobandgeorge | 37 minutes ago
Thanks!
mortgagepants | 4 hours ago
how much is 8% of 3 trilly?
Cptawesome23 | an hour ago
Total payouts was actually $864 billion. So like $60 billion were found to be possibly fraud. Not very much in the scheme of things.
Mallissin | 4 hours ago
The term "fraudulent" meaning they broke the law in attaining them.
There was a significant percentage of companies that followed the law but abused it's language to take out more PPP loans than they needed.
They did this by posting for jobs either with very easy requirements with intent to hire for unnecessary work and short-changing the employee hired (keeping the difference through accounting tricks or exemptions in the law) or incredibly particular requirements without intent to hire in order to pass a check in an amendment to the law that allowed keeping the loan if a job role could not be filled because the talent was not available (keeping all of it).
So, while that review may be correct in it's assessment of fraudulent loans, it is not including the amount of graft that operated within the definitions of the law and are unlikely to lead to prosecutions.
suspectslowloris | 4 hours ago
My mother ran a recruiting firm for CPAs in addition to being a former CPA herself. I moved back home during Covid and remember the look of genuine concern on her face when she got off the phone after securing a PPP loan for her company.
First thing she said was “they are never going to know where any of this money went.” She had prepared copious amounts of documentation covering all the details of her company and why they qualified for the amount she was seeking. They didn’t ask for any of it. Wild.
M-T-Burgermeister | 3 hours ago
My org received a forgiven PPP loan. I brought binders of records to the bank, but the loan officer hardly looked at them. In fact, he thought the amount I was requesting was a little low and gave me his best Matthew McConaughey "you've got to pump those numbers up" impression. I was shocked and would have been appalled... but I was getting a bunch of free money!
Cptawesome23 | an hour ago
You have no idea how much money was gained legally but in the wrong amount pursuant to the needs of individual companies. I’m insulted at your insinuation that you have any inkling at all. Could have been another $100 billion, could have been $12. You have no idea.
HopeConspiracies | 4 hours ago
This sounds like you fell for some bullshit on the internet. It just reeks of lies.
Cptawesome23 | an hour ago
It’s easily accessible info from the department of treasuries own investigation mandate from congress so…. Here’s a quick source quoting the numbers from investigation:
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/springfield/news/how-the-fbi-is-combatting-covid-19-related-fraud
Substantial-Equal661 | 6 hours ago
I hadn’t summed that up in my head. You are exactly right.
Brave_Yesterday_6106 | 6 hours ago
20 trillion in debt and a war the US can't afford. But hey the stock market keeps hitting ATH.
Curious-Donut5744 | 6 hours ago
Ahem… $40T in debt
Substantial-Equal661 | 6 hours ago
I think the commenter was mentioning the $20b he added.
Curious-Donut5744 | 6 hours ago
He’s added ~$12T over both administrations.
Keeper151 | 4 hours ago
12 Trillion, with a T.
Curious-Donut5744 | 4 hours ago
Ooops, that’s definitely a typo. Thanks
Infinite_Music2059 | 2 hours ago
For context, Obama added 9tr over two terms and Biden added 8tr over one term. They had unique issues with the financial crash and Covid, but this is obviously a bipartisan American addiction to debt.
chrisk9 | 6 hours ago
The electorate sleep walked through Project 2025
GeocentricParallax | 6 hours ago
Nah, this is revisionism. The conditions you are referring to were unique to the period early 2021-early 2023, with the seasonally-adjusted quits rate having returned to its pre-pandemic baseline of 2.3% by April 2023 before beginning a downward slide in December of that year, finally bottoming out at 1.9% in November 2024 (which is tied for the lowest of the post-pandemic period). The labor market has been ass for nearly 3.5 years at this point.
oursland | 5 hours ago
Correct. I recall 2023 being the beginning of the tough times while frequent commenters here denying the reports and stating that inflation was transitory and okay.
Visual-Hunter-1010 | 4 hours ago
And this is also a contributing reason to sinking the Biden/Harris campaign. You can't sit there and say the economy is fine when real world people know it's not true. Even if certain spreadsheets and such say so.
oursland | 4 hours ago
Yeah, and while they denied the experience of the average person they crowed about their "BIDENOMICS!" as the future of their campaign. If mass layoffs, outsourcing, combined with high prices and high inflation were the things being championed, then the conclusion was obvious.
The economy is more than the stock market. Our leaders should act like it.
Fuzea | 3 hours ago
The thing is, you don't just fix the historical levels of printing, the supply side disruptions, or global energy shocks that happened under both Trump and Biden overnight. Of course inflation spiked, it happened all over the globe. The US was still vastly better equipped to navigate the post-pandemic economy and ultimately recover when compared to every other western nation. The US experienced stronger real GDP growth, more rapid disinflation, and lower levels of unemployment when compared to every other G7 nation.
We were in the process of executing what Dalio calls "beautiful deleveraging", but the American public is apparently too impatient to persevere the unwinding of a mess decades in the making. That's why they ended up voting for the guy that promised to bring the good times back without any actual understanding of how exactly he would do so. We voted for tariff policy that has been definitively proven to be inflationary, rather than sticking with the inflationary and deflationary levers (combination of austerity, debt defaulting/restructuring, money printing, wealth redistribution) under Biden that, by the data, were working (albeit slowly).
oursland | 37 minutes ago
There were cracks in every aspect of what you were saying. Obvious things that an interaction with the public would reveal, but instead there was a reliance upon the very metrics you claim that had them crowing for "BIDENOMICS" while mass layoffs were occurring, while financial programs were created for the corporations to ensure that stock valuations would remain high, even as inflation was eating at the value of wages.
Unemployment sure sounds low when following the Obama administration, we count someone taking a job as a gig worker just the same as a salaried person who was let go.
People love to point to the statistics that wage growth among the lowest quintile was the greatest without considering the fact that their household economics includes means-tested support programs that they no longer qualify for. Their income is greater, but their ability to make ends meet is curtailed.
It sure is convenient for the administration that we measure rent not directly but by asking homeowners what they think they might rent their place for; they're always underestimating what the market rate currently is.
Of course these sorts of concerns affect the average American, not the privileged college educated political establishment the Democratic party employs as staffers. Naturally, they could have a conversation with the people they claim to represent, but instead they've opted to look at these carefully selected numbers.
Wonderful_Piglet591 | 5 hours ago
Welp, too late for my sorry ass…
PricedOut4Ever | 6 hours ago
The inflation started under Biden.
I don’t disagree with you on not liking Trump. But things have not been good since 2019 and that includes Bidens entire term.
We deserve better.
Born_ina_snowbank | 6 hours ago
Biden’s entire term reigning in inflation that was gifted to him by?
anewleaf1234 | 6 hours ago
Trump shits the bed on covid.
Biden has to deal with massive supply chain issues due to covid.
Biden's economy was the best in the world for the times. And under Trump, that economy has ground to a halt with pointless trade wars if the president's feelings are hurt.
Blaming Biden seems a bit rich here. He did the best he could do with a shitty hand.
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 6 hours ago
Biden didn't solve it fast enough so we deserve a nazi pedophile who is tanking the economy but gives white supremacists self esteem?
PickledPepa | 6 hours ago
It started under him, but was mostly attributed to him for no reason. He didn't cause the complete meltdown of supply chains, and one could argue that Trump 1 could have done a better job at maintaining supply chains, and Biden had nothing to do with the gasoline price spike.
Recently economists have attributed up to 50% of the Biden era inflation on price gouging from corporations who knew that we had saved up money as consumers. On top of it all, since the Iran war started it has been found that the OPEC countries had underreported 500 million barrels of oil, so the price spike when Russia invaded Ukraine was horseshit too.
Other countries who want to see us fail, and greedy corporations here definitely influence our elections with their pricing schemes. Break them all up. Bust the trusts.
PricedOut4Ever | 5 hours ago
But he “resided” over the inflation. And the republicans are not wrong to point out he didn’t really do shit about it.
Biden was not a good president. It’s been a while since we’ve had one.
broguequery | 2 hours ago
I mean I know it's all opinions but I think he was a very good president.
One of the best I've seen in 30 years.
He was just getting too old by the end of it.
Individual_Limit_701 | 6 hours ago
Spot on. Working 2 or 3 part-time gig jobs just to afford groceries gets counted as "fully employed" in the headline numbers. It completely distorts reality
Slumunistmanifisto | 6 hours ago
You can't live like that forever. You'll get so many negative statistics that will spin off from so many people surviving like this.
ItGradAws | 4 hours ago
That’s me! Highly technical IT engineer who got laid off, went back to school to be able to deploy AI models and i can’t find work anywhere. Almost 3 years out. Now I’m licensed in insurance contracting with two different company’s for 100% commission (it’s still shit pay) and trying to get a startup off the ground so my tech skills don’t degrade into the ground. What a great fucking economy!
Membership-Great | 4 hours ago
How much are those commission insurance jobs paying friend?
ItGradAws | 4 hours ago
Fucking nothing, there’s a reason 93% of agents leave after the first year
Membership-Great | 3 hours ago
What’s nothing?
ItGradAws | 2 hours ago
Minimum wage, I’m making less now than i was with my first internship back in college 10 years ago. Cheers to this great economy.
Membership-Great | 2 hours ago
I still don’t know how much you make lol, it can’t literally be min wage because you said it’s commission. Are you saying the amount you make is equivalent to min wage? Which could be half in some states what it would be in others.. I was really just curious like what your paycheck and how often, and how many hours you’re working for it. Interested in doing this myself if other stuff doesn’t work out.
ItGradAws | an hour ago
It averages out to minimum wage. I cannot not recommend insurance sales enough. It is a brutal, cut throat industry full of MLM scam style companies. The licensing takes a lot of time as well. I’d recommend doing anything else as a back up. There’s a good reason 93% of agents leave the field after the first year. The amount if scamming i see within my own org is ridiculous.
guachi01 | 6 hours ago
The % of workers working multiple jobs is small and in line with historical norms.
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
Is this true? Where I can read more about this?
guachi01 | 6 hours ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
SardScroll | 5 hours ago
Upvoted for giving a source, and a good source at that.
Ruminant | 5 hours ago
Look at this: Table A-16. People not in the labor force and multiple jobholders by sex, not seasonally adjusted. It breaks down the multiple jobholder numbers by situation, like full-time and part-time, both full-time, both part-time, etc.
And if you're curious about the historical numbers for those series, you can look up most of them in FRED.
Joltizer | 3 hours ago
Please stop sharing trash links to this sub if you don't even know basic things like this
Jawyp | 5 hours ago
Only around 5% of workers have multiple jobs, and that figure hasn’t meaningfully changed since the 90s (when it was significantly higher).
mortgagepants | 4 hours ago
are you counting w2 jobs, or gigs, or a combination?
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
Is this true? Where can I learn more about this?
Joltizer | 3 hours ago
No it doesn't. The number of part time workers has not shifted at all. It's just you making things up to fit your priors
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea06.htm
Ruminant | 4 hours ago
It's true that the number of workers who say they usually work full-time has fallen by 2.3 million since January 2025.
However, the source for that 2.3 million figure also shows that the number of workers who are part-time because they cannot find full-time work only increased by ~326,000 people.
So your "mirage" theory doesn't really match the data.
Mimshot | 6 hours ago
That’s down from an all time high. U6 is sitting at 7.9% though.
Rude_Judgment7928 | 7 hours ago
Jobs should always be put in context of workforce. With retirement and emigration, what is the true size of work force (18-64) over this time period.
jarena009 | 6 hours ago
They don't publish full and part time by age. Net immigration is still positive 1.4-1.5MM, and there's no indication this is just boomers retiring. The population is still growing by 0.6-0.8% per year.
Rude_Judgment7928 | 6 hours ago
Source? Any data I can find (especially if you include undocumented) shows the opposite trend or prediction: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implications-of-immigration-flows-in-2025-and-2026-january-2026-update/
SardScroll | 5 hours ago
While I agree that it's not "just" boomers retiring, I think the retired population needs to be taken into account. We have not only a vastly larger number of retired persons than any time before, but more importantly also a higher percentage. This is due to the size of the baby boomer population, but also that they're living longer than prior generations too.
out_of_context96 | 4 hours ago
Whats the mm unit?
Joltizer | 3 hours ago
There is a reason you are using raw numbers instead of rate statistics. It's because you want to lie about the economy
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
Prime age employment is near all time highs
> The unemployment numbers in total are a mirage since part time jobs replaced these lost full time jobs.
Why do you keep making things up?
Part time employment hasn't shifted at all
jarena009 | an hour ago
Full time jobs down since January 2025:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12500000
Joltizer | 50 minutes ago
That is basically no movement and part time jobs have not replaced them. Pay attention to what I'm teaching you
FearlessPark4588 | 3 hours ago
it could be, in very reasonable numbers, retiring boomers
TheTav3n | 6 hours ago
Ya I work 2 part time jobs. I am not sure what I am included in with these statistics coming out
carlos_the_dwarf_ | 5 hours ago
The trouble with this (well, one of them) is that even this measure is low relative to history.
People just want to compare it to U3 because they like that it makes things look worse.
nter12345 | 6 hours ago
I mean if you look at the historical chart it mirrors the standard unemployment rate so while the headline is sensational it’s really a non-issue.
That being said I’m a proponent of not linking health insurance to a job so as to avoid employers artificially keeping workers “part time.
Gold_Tank6120 | 5 hours ago
What would the substitute be then, for access to health insurance? Assuming universal healthcare is off the table, as much as I want it.
MercuryEnigma | 5 hours ago
Not that I personally want this, but have health insurance work like other insurance: private companies that anyone can buy with heavy state regulation of pricing, benefits, terms, etc.
WayneKrane | 3 hours ago
Yeah, I don’t get why I can’t buy policies offered in other states. My options are between two companies and in the last state I lived in I had only one option on the exchange.
spaghettiking216 | 4 hours ago
You can have a system that offers generous ACA subsidies for people who really need it, like people without full time employment or people between jobs. We already have the marketplaces, we just need to expand the subsidies.
FlyingBishop | 4 hours ago
There's no need for a substitute. 4% is incredibly low for the standard unemployment rate, it's about as low as it would ever be. This "true rate of unemployment" would only be interesting if you could demonstrate that it doesn't generally move up and down with the official rate. But like, let's call this rate T, if T is 25% today, and U3 is 4%, and some months ago when T was 26% U3 was 5%, there's absolutely zero interesting information in T. T is literally just redefining "best possible" to be 25% instead of 4%. And it has the problematic side effect that it makes the difference between 25% and 30% seem much less terrible than the difference between 4% and 9%, when in fact the latter is a bigger deal.
mortgagepants | 4 hours ago
> I mean if you look at the historical chart it mirrors the standard unemployment rate so while the headline is sensational it’s really a non-issue.
i guess we'll see in november if voters think it is a non-issue or not.
Cum_on_doorknob | 3 hours ago
This is r/economics, not r/politicalfeelz
Voters will punish republicans for failing to address affordability in any meaningful way.
ahundreddollarbills | 5 hours ago
> Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
I understand what they are trying to get at, but it doesn't feel like they are going about it the right way.
If a student (aged 16+) that is currently enrolled in school that has no desire for FT work and makes under $26,000 would be considered unemployed by their methodology.
This data might make sense if you wanted to look at the "health" for the economy, eg what jobs are being created /destroyed. For example if data showed an increase in TRU uneployment while the BLS data stayed flat or declined maybe something interesting or new could be teased out of the data.
But looking at the two data sets on one chart, the TRU rate is just 20 points +/- the BLS rate
Synensys | 2 hours ago
Yes. Lots of people work part time by choice. Students, stay at home parents, retirees. All of them count as functionally unemployed by this metric and in fact based on other metrics likely make up most of the difference between official rates and this one.
vinny_twoshoes | 5 hours ago
Using a different way to measure unemployment is going to lead to different numbers, yes. Whether it's good or bad is debatable, but just splashing a big number up there without contextualizing whether this is historically high or low on its own terms is really meaningless.
MightyBone | 4 hours ago
Exactly. Incredibly annoying to see someone trot out some big horrible economic metric that is never normally used and act like it means the sky is falling but if you check it historically it's always been that way.
mortgagepants | 4 hours ago
imagine thinking something has been historically wrong and thinking it is wrong now just means people are measuring it wrong.
MightyBone | an hour ago
Something has been historically the same but now all of a sudden people are trotting it out like it is different - that is the problem. Without historical perspective it's a meaningless statistic.
Moral-Relativity | 5 hours ago
It’s always difficult to square employment stats with sentiment, like the gloomy job related subs. Feels like a particularly perilous period for workers due to the combination of disruptive technology such as AI and a clown-led government.
GruePwnr | 4 hours ago
I'm of the take that social media has increased people's consciousness if the issues, rather than the issues getting substantially worse.
Dry_Perception_1682 | 6 hours ago
If you look at the graph of this new measure, the past four years have been the best, lowest unemployment in US history, confirming some of the best job market periods ever.
[OP] [Deleted] | 7 hours ago
handsoapdispenser | 6 hours ago
One thing to consider with any alternative measure is that you can't compare it against the standard U3. Idk what LISEP is but what is the all-time high and low to measure against this reading? The value in looking at U3 is we can make an apples to apples comparison over time and say when the rate is unusually high or unusually low. It is well known that it is not a comprehensive and it's not meant to be. It's an indicator. Actual policy makers will dig directly into dozens of data points and even the raw data when they need to. They don't just read the newspaper and react.
Unhelpfulperson | 6 hours ago
Does it tell us any information that the regular unemployment rate doesn’t? It looks like this rate moves up and down pretty much identically to the regular unemployment rate, and has been somewhat flat at a low level (lower than the entire 1995-2020 period) since mid-2021
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
Yes I agree that's the main question. If you're measuring something in a different way and getting the same pattern, what value do the additional data points add?
To me, it seems the goal is to present a more "real" picture of the health of the labor market. I haven't read the underlying 2020 paper but certainly the 25% number has a different impact than the 4% number, and I don't think it's necessarily misleading. I think it's meaningful that a quarter of the workforce isn't able to access full-time employment that brings them out of poverty. And I think it potentially guards against an artificially rosy unemployment figure by highlighting these other factors as well.
However, the lack of differentiation with the headline unemployment figure is a challenge. It's probably better to think of the three figures separately.
FlyingBishop | 4 hours ago
It would be better to look at the poverty rate directly. This is a metric that pretends to be a poverty rate but it's actually just the unemployment rate stated in a dishonest way.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
> What's LISEP's reputation among economists? This seems like a fairly heterodox but not completely bonkers way to measure the health of the labor market
Prettymuch that it's a bullshit figure that really measures nothing of value. The core issue is that LISEP arbitrarily determines what "functionally employed" means and publishes that as if it's truth. One metric is just part of the BLS's labor under utilization reports - part time for economic reasons.
But the big disparity, and LISEP purposefully obscures this data, is that they also count anyone who makes less than ~$25k as functionally unemployed. What this does is creates massive upwards pressure from all sorts of purposefully part time individuals - teenagers working summer jobs, elderly people working one day a week for fun, stay at home spouses working some small hobby/philanthropic job, college students, etc.
They know this is the case too, which is why they don't publish demographic data on who falls in to that specific category of unemployed, as you'd see clear as day that it's heavily weighted to those demographics that work part time on purpose. LISEP claims to exclude purposefully part time individuals, yet puts them right back in the unemployed category with this income threshold.
> Their method of measuring unemployment (unemployment + underemployment + poverty wages) should really be called something else, but I can see it playing a useful corrective in contrast w/ the headline unemployment number.
It's called what it is because economists can already measure all of these things independently, so their data really holds no actual economic value, therefore it's named and engineered to gather clicks from people who don't know any better.
> How would these numbers compare with other OECD countries?
In terms of how many other OECD countries have individuals meeting similar wage criteria? The figures would be significantly higher. The US is the highest wage country by a massive margin. The poverty wage line indicated by LISEP is not far off from the median incomes in much of southern europe for example.
Ruminant | 4 hours ago
>But the big disparity, and LISEP purposefully obscures this data, is that they also count anyone who makes less than ~$25k as functionally unemployed. What this does is creates massive upwards pressure from all sorts of purposefully part time individuals - teenagers working summer jobs, elderly people working one day a week for fun, stay at home spouses working some small hobby/philanthropic job, college students, etc.
Per their methodology white paper, they compute a number of "TRU" variants to test how changing their classification criteria affects the final rates. One of those variants uses an hourly threshold (I believe $15/hour in 2020 dollars) instead of annualizing their weekly earnings. Their methodology specifically says they compare the outcomes of the $15/hour and $20,000/year variants to verify that the annual earnings threshold isn't just capturing people who chose to work a small number of hours in the reference week.
That still doesn't fully address your criticism, of course. Someone who doesn't need to earn a living wage might voluntarily choose a job that pays less but has some other benefit (flexibility, area of interest, etc). It seems misleading to call that person functional unemployed. But their annual income test isn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds.
I still question whether this metric is a useful or informative. And Ludwig himself is an attention-seeking hack, as his virally misleading Politico op-ed made clear.
CanAlwaysBeBetter | 6 hours ago
> Unemployment + Underemployment + Poverty wages near all-time lows
Not quite as fear mongering as your title but accurate summary of their data
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
It's not my title, that's why I placed it in quotes.
Adventurous-Roof488 | 6 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/s/zieo2lpNN6
Editing to include top comment:
The "true" unemployment is truly nonsense because it's just counting everyone without a job. So a billionaire with millions in passive would count as "unemployed" and someone with a chronic disease preventing them from working at all would count as unemployed, too. There is a reason we don't do this.
And it doesn't tell us anything different about the recovery, either. Because while the level might be different, the change really isn't. Meaning unemployment going up or down and "true" unemployment going up and down follow mostly the same patterns.
You can see that in the graph on their website, too:
https://www.lisep.org/tru
TheMauveHand | 6 hours ago
To the best of my understanding all it's just adding an almost constant figure onto standard unemployment figures, making it seem worse in the eyes of (frankly, stupid) people who complain two different metrics to each other directly. Over time, this should parallel ordinary unemployment measures nearly perfectly.
Ruminant | 4 hours ago
In fairness to this so-called "TRU", it isn't just adding a constant onto BLS's own unemployment rates. The rate is derived from the household survey's public-use microdata (i.e. the anonymized responses from the same detailed interviews that the official unemployment statistics are based on). TRU just defines different criteria for what classifies a respondent as "unemployed".
This is not me defending TRU. I don't think it is particularly useful or informative.
But I bring up TRU's methodology because there is a different inflation-truther and unemployment-truther website run by a grifter who does literally just add a constant to the official BLS rates... and then sells subscriptions for the full set of his fake statistics.
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
And indeed it does mirror standard unemployment, so I agree - probably not adding much other than providing a larger number for political-rhetorical purposes
Hamster_S_Thompson | 6 hours ago
It looks like it's not much higher than the lowest ever recorded by this metric
akcrono | 6 hours ago
That's exactly why posts like this are nonsense. Unemployment is historically on the lower end no matter what metric you're using
ChiSox1906 | 6 hours ago
The problem with this is it's accuracy varies by how high the percentage is. If we assume the amount of millionaires not working and disabled is near static, then the "True Unemployment" becomes more representative of the greater population the larger the percentage is.
SardScroll | 5 hours ago
I would disagree with that assumption, however. The number of millionaires increases over time (both in terms of "actual millionaires" and "sit and live off income/principal people") and the disabled numbers are not at all static, both with more people becoming permanently disabled, but also you have the transiently disabled population (e.g. as someone who has cared for both my parents undergoing cancer treatment...I'd regard anyone undergoing cancer treatment as being at least temporarily disabled).
Fragrant_Entry9232 | 4 hours ago
Wrong.
TheGoodCod | 6 hours ago
The exact equivalents to LISEP in say France and Germany aren't easy to find. But if I'm remembering correctly from earlier in the year it's like 21% and 19% respectively.
The UK is situated pretty much in the same area as the US.
Personally I think a graph over time is interesting. It doesn't change as much as I expected.
https://www.lisep.org/tru
PoopyisSmelly | 6 hours ago
Lisep is widely considered disingenuous and is disregarded by most mainstream economists entirely. Its definition is incredibly broad and it isnt useful at displaying anything that other data meausures dont already display.
Its mostly an inflamatory way of contrarians pointing out "Hurr durr, unemployment high", and LISEP is policy advocacy group, not a neutral non-partisan statistical bureau or peer-reviewed academic journal.
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
Can you point me towards some sources re: LISEP's reputation?
What is LISEP's angle as a policy advocacy group?
EDIT: Don't really understand the downvotes. This is a good faith question
PoopyisSmelly | 5 hours ago
Their angle is on their website - its advocacy and policy, not a true peer reviewed fact based metric economists would use
https://www.lisep.org/mission
Most reputable economists dont engage directly with policy advocacy groups, so you wont find many writing about them publicly unfortunately, but there is a reason it isnt a cited metric by any major economist outside of the twittersphere or reddit.
Again, there are more accurate and nuanced datasets that already illustrate the aspects that LISEP tries to point out - they have a goal they are trying to achieve.
Beyond_Reason09 | 4 hours ago
100% of the time I see this posted on on reddit, especially less literate subs, the poster and the vast majority of people commenting have no idea what the statistic is actually saying, and I believe the org is intentionally misleading. As evidence for the intent, after the 2024 election they cited their "TRU unemployment rate" as vindicating the election of Donald Trump, even though that statistic was at an all-time historic low under Biden.
fuzzballz5 | 2 hours ago
The real numbers are rather simple. Everyone I know, in my circle knows someone that’s been on long term unemployment. Educated people. People with experience. When you go buy groceries, you’re not buying certain products because you refuse to pay that price or you can’t afford that price.
Our Government over my 50 years has failed us. There’s no other way to asses it than failure. Every administration for the last 50 years has sold out to corporations. Every single one. Incremental has now turned into the lobbyists write the laws that get passed through contributions.
cheddarben | 6 hours ago
I hate headlines like this. It imposes some sort of meaning in relation to what we all understand to be the unemployment rate (the U-3). What is important to do with stuff like this is to look at the entire dataset over time in the context of everything.
Just like the U-6. Just like the U-3. This 24.9%, how they measure, is still historically pretty low.
There are ABSOLUTELY things to criticize in the jobs report and there are some bleak things, but jfc, lets not throw rage bait statistics out there that are meant to three card monty motherfuckers into believing a mirage.
[OP] [Deleted] | 6 hours ago
Are you saying LISEP is being disingenous? This is the first time I've encountered this measure so I was curious to learn what the community thinks about this method. So far it seems the consensus is that it adds more noise than signal.
cheddarben | 5 hours ago
No. I am saying the headline is a bit disingenuous, not what they are measuring.
Yeah, it can be a good metric to watch. Without perspective and context, it sounds alarms that don’t need to be sounded. If you look at this metric over time, it is low.
Jumpy_Childhood7548 | 5 hours ago
LISEP counts anyone earning under $26,000 a year as "unfunctionally unemployed," even if they have a part-time job and are not looking for more work. I could have part time work, millions in net worth, and be functionally unemployed by their measure.
Beautiful_Finger4566 | 3 hours ago
I was that for the last two years
I'm worth $2M+ and quit my full-time job to do contract work after my son was born
I was still working and made about $100k in investments per year, but by their definition I was unemployed
Jumpy_Childhood7548 | 3 hours ago
Similar to us. Lisep is nonsense.
Joltizer | 3 hours ago
Uneducated leftist really love this statistic because it lets them ignore reality and assert their priors without actually learning anything on the topic, just like Trump supporters