Here is the dirty little secret about the unemployment numbers:
When you’re collecting unemployment check, you have to certify every two weeks that you are looking for work. Unless you do so, you don’t get a check.
So people who are collecting a check will report every two weeks that they are looking for work. These people are counted in the statistics as unemployed, but in the labor market. This goes on for 99 weeks, until the unemployment runs out, and the check stop.
After that, nobody bothers to report to the government that they’re looking for work every two weeks. At this point they drop off of the rolls. They are no longer counted as looking for work, and they are no longer in the labor market. They are not included in the calculation of the unemployment rate.
But the only difference between a worker who has been collecting checks for 88 weeks, and a worker who is been out of work for 102 weeks, and is no longer collecting a check, is that one report to the government that he is looking for work and the other will not. There is no rational reason to include one in the unemployment rate and not the other.
The other dirty little secret of unemployment is that many people, when their 99 weeks of unemployment run out, file for disability insurance. The fact that they have been out of work for two years is taken as evidence of their disability. So they go from collecting one kind of check to another kind of check. People on disability are also not counted in the unemployment rate.
That is how we can have 98 million unemployed people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%
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A graph plotting the rise in disability claims against the unemployment numbers since 2008 might show the cause & effect...
Bttt!
You’re wrong. Unemployment only lasts 6 months.