{"id":5222,"date":"2015-02-03T16:34:28","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5222"},"modified":"2015-02-03T16:34:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:34:28","slug":"the-big-lie-5-6-unemployment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5222","title":{"rendered":"The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment<\/a><\/h3>\n

Here\u2019s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don\u2019t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.<\/p>\n

Right now, we\u2019re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is \u201cdown\u201d to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.<\/p>\n

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you\u2019ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn\u2019t count you as unemployed. That\u2019s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren\u2019t throwing parties to toast \u201cfalling\u201d unemployment.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you\u2019re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you\u2019re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment Here\u2019s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don\u2019t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading. Right now, we\u2019re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2864,1426,655,3161,3162,860,877],"class_list":["post-5222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-lies","tag-misinformation","tag-propaganda","tag-us-department-of-labor","tag-us-unemployment","tag-wall-street","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5223,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5222\/revisions\/5223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}