A person from the Heritage Foundation said employed teenagers were once at 50% of their total population, 10 years ago. Now that is down to 40% of teenagers are employed. He said if the minimum wage increases, that would be bad for adults trying to find work because they would have to compete with a huge influx of teens entering the workforce, wanting to earn those same wages.
Recently in the past couple months, several hundreds of thousands of people have taken part-time work. According a report on CNBC, half of those surveyed want to work full-time but because of the job market, they had to settle for part-time work.
Just as you have people who take themselves out of the home buying market when the housing prices are too high and enter the housing market when the prices are low. We have many people who will enter the workforce when there is a real demand for workers, represented by an increase in the wages being offered. This natural process has aborted by the government and by business. Businesses turn to the government when they cannot find workers at the wage they want to pay and request indentured servants from other countries to work for them. Or sometimes business employ illegal immigrants who are willing to work for less than Americans.
Economists have stated that the country needs to add 200,000 jobs per month (or about 2 million jobs per year) just to keep up with all the new people entering the job market.
Unemployment numbers does not count the millions of people who are underemployed, "involuntary part-time" workers (those who are working part-time, but want to work full-time), those who have lost their jobs and have become discouraged over time from actively looking for work, those who have retired before the official retirement age but would still like to work, etc.
Unemployment figures are limited to certain group of people. This is evident during the early stages of an economic boom when unemployment often rise. This is because people join the labor market because of the improving job market, but until they have actually found a position they are counted as unemployed. Similarly, during a recession, the increase in the unemployment rate is moderated by people leaving the labor force.
You are making too much sense.
Most economists will tell you the number of underemployed or discouraged employment seekers are around another 1 percentage point above the official unemployment numbers during a period of growing GDP AS WE HAVE NOW, and a little more in a recessionary period. Don't try to mitigate good news with deceptive economic information. Economists say it is always typical to have another 1 percentage point beyond the unemployment rate of the chronically unemployed or underemployed. There will always even in the best economy, and this is shaping up to be one of them, going to be a group of people who just can't seem to find steady work. A big part of it is their own lack of education and skills more than anything about the economy itself. This doesn't need to become another tired illegal alien debate. The fact is the US economy is beginning to show signs of labor shortages.
One other point. Unemployment numbers DO reflect people who were fired for cause yet their employers take pity on them and allow them to claim unemployment benefits. This happened to me once and I've seen it happen in other cases. So there are people in those unemployment numbers who lost jobs because of lack of performance or misconduct, not just economic displacement. Also, the "given up" crowd includes people who have started home based business. These in many cases have given people higher incomes than when they were employed by others. I know of several examples just in my own life. But it is also an economic reality business experts and economics gurus have noted as a growing trend stemming out of our Internet culture.