>The true unemployment is far higher than 5.3%. It's only 5.3% if you believe that those who have been unemployed for longer than 12 months are no longer unemployed. When you count up the true unemployment rate, it is far far higher.
That has been the case for a long time... the measure of unemployment was changed decades ago to make things look better. Obama didn't do it. But that's not what matters. What matters is that things are improving. The unemployment rate got into double digits in early 2009, and it's 5.3% now. We can argue about what 5.3% U3 means on an absolute basis (and there are at least six different measures of unemployment that are used; they're all consistent but they measure different things), but there's no doubt that it's a TON better than 10%, and that 5.3% under Obama means roughly the same as it did under Bush or under Clinton (if I recall correctly, the definition was changed under LBJ and then again under Clinton, but I don't think it's been changed much, if at all, under Obama). So we can measure basically apples to apples. If anything, 5.3% is a bit better under Obama than it was under Clinton (not for people, which is what I care about; it's basically the same there, but as far as demonstrating how the levers that the government has traditionally been willing to use, which is what matters when distinguishing one politician/administration from the other); it's a small miracle that unemployment can be about what it was 20 years ago given the improvements in employee-replacing technology and globalization. That's pretty impressive.
>The true unemployment rate is easy to count. Just take 1 minus the Labor Participation Rate and you get the true number of people who are taking money from the government and giving nothing in return. That's the true unemployment rate, because the rest of us have to figure out a way to pay for the 37% of the people who take and don't give.
That's silly for a number of reasons. Among them.
For one thing, you're only really considering income tax and employment taxes. Thanks to politicians mostly on the (R) side, the tax burden has been shifting towards consumption taxes, which hit everyone, because everyone consumes, and thus contributes.
Doing the math the way you do it includes people that probably shouldn't be working -- retirees, children/teens, college and graduate students, members of the military, the disabled, parents with young children, etc. Unless you want these people to go out and get jobs. I personally like child labor laws. I like for people to not have to spend the final years of their lives, where work gets really painful or even impossible, toiling away at a job and also crowding out people who really want to get into the economy for the first time. I like that people can take a few years here and there in their lives after they turn 18 to improve themselves and to learn things without having to have the stress of a full-time job. It's so much harder to learn when life is bearing down on you. I think it's nice if a parent can take a couple of years to raise his or her kids. It's good for the parent and it's good for the kid. Family values!
Additionally, the population is getting proportionally older because of the Baby Boomers. It won't be this way forever, but for the next 20-30 years, retirees will be a higher percentage of the population. If you were born at the beginning of the baby boom, you're 69 years old now. If you were born at the end, you're 51. The percentage of retirees will (hopefully, if people can afford to retire) increase until more than half of that cohort passes the average American life expectancy, and thus dies off. Then that number will go down again.
So, yeah, your way of calculating unemployment and "the people who take and don't give" is seriously flawed, uncompassionate, not family friendly, and shortsighted.
-Z |
