42% is extreme and rhetorical - even if Stockmans explanation is, well, some sort of explanation.
5.1% is simply misleading. This works only as a tracking number vs recent history, and the metric is obsolete as there has been a big change in labor force participation. This change in labor force participation makes this old unemployment metric entirely useless as it is not comparable with the situation in, say, 2000 or 2006.
Conversely, CNN Money is also being deliberately disingenuous here -
“There’s a valid, but different, conversation to have about the trend that more and more American adults aren’t working. It was expected that the number of American adults in the workforce would decline as more Baby Boomers reached retirement age.”
This is entirely false, and it is well known to be false by every expert on the labor force. The decline in labor force participation skews young, not old. There has been no decline in over-55 labor force participation, and whatever mook they dragged in knows that very well.
Well, it took 35 posts but you hit the salient point. Employment among old folks is increasing because ZIRP has sucked them dry. Young folks continue to play video games in Mom’s basement.