during the election... both candidates went on about the 8% unemployment and how 25m people were out of work
we have 132m people filing taxes... at best, that’s 25m / 132m or 19%
the only way you get to 8% is if you use the total population:
25m / 310m == 8.06%
I’m pretty sure kids and the elderly are in that 310m...
just the facts
The unemployment rate numbers come from the government BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). All the information that follows is available at the BLS website (bls.gov), if you care to look.
They define the unemployment rate as “the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force”.
They define the labor force as “the sum of employed and unemployed persons”.
They define “not in the labor force” as “persons who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force. This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work.”
The BLS does not provide employment statistics for people under 16 years of age. That indicates that they do not consider children to be part of the labor force.
The devil is in the details, as you can see in this statement:
“Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Persons who were not working and were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off are also included as unemployed. Receiving benefits from the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program has no bearing on whether a person is classified as unemployed.”
People who have stopped looking for work are not considered to be unemployed, and they are obviously not employed. So, they are removed from the labor force and thus do not appear in the unemployment rate number as released periodically by the BLS, and it is that bogus number that is used by the Administration to “prove” that they have fixed the economy.