I think you are overstating the bad news, which need not be overstated to be really bad.
The SGS Alternate, which is the only number that approaches your 22.5% unemployment, includes “SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers.” So, there is little or no data to support the addition to the U-6 number. More importantly, it is not at all clear that “long-term discouraged workers” means much more than slackers who have found a way to live without working. Such folks may be unproductive and may even be leeches, but not because of the economy.
I suggest sticking with the U-6 number. It is horrible, and using it avoids the plausible charge of overstating unemployment for political purposes. No exaggeration is needed to demonstrate that Obama is a Category 5 disaster.
Do you mean the U-3 number? The U-6 number is over 22% today (and approaches 23% with the latest data).
Yes - there are millions of "slackers" out there.
But - we can't play apples and oranges vis this Depression and the Great Depression if we want an honest comparison of unemployment.
It's like this: your average goof out there see's unemployment below 10% (well, just barely now....and these numbers are even juiced by the Labor Feds). Then, your average good watches Katie Couric report the numbers, but then reminds everyone that during the Great Depression, the numbers were 25% unemployed (some even say it was 28% in 1937 during the further Depression downturn that resulted from FDRs disastrous socialism policies). So, average goof listens to Katie, and says "Hmmm....well, we're not even half as bad off as the country was in the 1930's. Right?"
Wrong. We might even be worse off:
- Our debt is much, much worse
- Our manufacturing and industrial base is but a fraction of what it was in the 1930's
- Our entitlement class is growing by the day, yet their percentage of the tax burden has shrunk significantly in 15 years, leaving them prone to demand even further "benefits" at no cost to their class group
- Regulation is 100 times worse than it was in the 1930's, and this is a huge turn off to starting new business to get the nation out of this terrible situation
I see your point, however, we have to acknowledge (in some fashion) that we "AIN'T at" 9.8% real unemployment. It is much, much worse.
You should NB that the unemployment numbers from the Great Depression were:
1. Arrived at “after the fact” - ie, in the early 60’s. There was no national reporting of unemployment in the 30’s, and the modern BLS stats don’t begin until 1948. Stanley Lebergott arrived at the 25% figures in his 1964 book “Manpower and Economic Growth.”
2. Lebergott’s methodology varies significantly from today’s BLS methods, down to the very question of “who is in the employment pool?” Lebergott used assumptions of:
a) As soon as you were 14 years old, you were ‘employable.’ Today, the child labor laws prohibit most employment until 16, and even then, job prospects due to safety regs are marginal for 16 and 17 year olds. eg, they can’t hold a job that requires dispensing of booze (until they’re 21), they can’t drive a company car, truck or heavy machinery, etc. About the only place that kids under 18 are fully employable is in farm/ranch operations, and guess what? The BLS reports aren’t reporting farm employment.
b) Lebergott also considered men in prisons and in the military to be ‘employable’ but ‘unemployed.’ Today, the BLS disregards these people as “institutionalized” and not available to the labor pool.
c) Lebergott considered even those working on FDR’s make-work program jobs to be unemployed. ie, if you had a job for the CCC, WPA, et al, and you’d been working there for months, Lebergott discounted this as “not employed.”
So the figures at which Lebergott arrived are, IMO, significantly higher than what the BLS would find today if we could time-warp the current BLS methodology back into the 1930’s.
The U-6 number is the closest thing we have to determining “true” unemployment in the US now, and it is very high relative to GDP, which gives and ominous portent of the future employment landscape.