Sorry, But The Real Unemployment Rate Is 9.8%, Not 5%

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Employment: The federal government keeps trying to fool all the people all the time with its jobs-market reports. The one just out is no different.

 

The March report showed some improvement on the hiring front. Jobs were up by 215,000, the labor-force participation rate ticked up to a still miserable 63%, and wages saw a welcome bump up. But stop already with the cartwheels in Washington. The jobs market is still remarkably weak for millions of Americans, and the biggest lie in Washington is that unemployment is just 5%.

 

The chart shows how misleading the unemployment statistics are. If you include people who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate is 6%. If you include people stuck in a part-time job for 20 or 25 hours a week, the real unemployment rate is a dreadful 9.8%. Why is Washington cheering?

We’ve been at or well above the 10% mark now for seven years. Over that time period wages have been basically flat. We’re some 5 million jobs short of where we would be if we had had a Reagan-style expansion, and at this pace of just over 200,000 jobs a month, it will take at least four more years to catch up.

Two of the industries with the biggest job gains were retail (48,000) and bars and restaurants (25,000). Amazingly, liberals used to call the Reagan years the “burger-flipper economy.”

This is some recovery.