This is why the official 'unemployment' level has lost it's meaning, it's just laborforce minus employed. imho we can see things a lot better by subtracting employed from the population:
It clearly shows the lowering of the unemployment rate is due to reducing the total number of eligible workers, "those in the workforce." Millions have retired, they are legitimately out of the workforce. But millions more that are unemployed and want a job are simply ignored. They are eligible workers that want to work. They have no current job and they are arbitrarily not counted.
Per the chart, the Total Non-farm Payroll has been holding at approx. 109 million since 2010 even though they say the workforce grows by 1.5 to 2 million each year with the influx of high school, trade school and college graduates, those of working age with no degrees and eligible immigrants. I don't know if that increase is the gross or net number of new eligible workers.
So they are removing more people from the workforce each month than are entering and that's a lot of people going uncounted!
But it's Friday afternoon b4 a holiday weekend so who cares about any of this anyway??
I'm thinking those with no job or no full-time job care. I think they feel they matter and they deserve to be counted.
Grand slam graph. Needs its own thread. Ping me to it.