Just asking - does the figure include retirees, or only people of working age, e.g., under 65? If the figure includes retirees, they would need to be backed out in order to see the true numbers of working-age people who have dropped out.
That’s what I’ve been wondering. These statistics don’t mean much without an age breakdown.
>>Just asking - does the figure include retirees, or only people of working age, e.g., under 65?<<
Yes, it includes not only retirees, but high school students who are 16 or older, as well as college kids. The only group it excludes in the denominator is the institutionalized population, that being those in nursing homes primarily.
That said, the number was 66% before the 2009 recession, so about 3% of approximately 240 million people, or about 7 million people, have dropped out of the labor force who could still be working. The advancing age of the baby boomers probably accounts for the rest of the 11+ million increase in those no longer working.
And if you add that 7 million to the 9 million or so who can’t find jobs but are still looking, you’d get about an 11% unemployment rate.
Whether they dropped out because they gave up looking, or because they managed to get on disability, or because Obama gave them so many benefits they couldn’t resist, is not sorted out by these numbers, however.
Anyway, the 92 million figure is more or less a crock of bull that’s been pushed by conservatives who are ignorant of the definitions employed in developing the statistics. It sounds distressing, but it’s very misleading and we should quit using it as it’s so easily rebutted. If we concentrated on the answer to your question instead, as I did above, we’d have a better argument because the true unemployment rate is above 10% in this country compared to when Bush was president.