It’s not “his” claim. It is the claim of a number of trained economists, including David Stockman.
What is really a joke is the 5.1% figure.
Even if you don’t like DT, you gotta give him some credit for saying these type of things...
The real effing joke is I made the same claim earlier this year, offering a myriad of reasons why someone isn’t working but, that the “Labor Participation Rate” is at its lowest in 40 years!
That shouldn’t be true, in a growing economy.
The Donald would be closer to “correct”
Reality Check: What’s the Real Unemployment Rate in the U.S.?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3300876/posts
Based on income, I set the fully employed rate at 60%, and the marginally employed/unemployed rate at 40%. If we accept the BLS’s 121 million full-time jobs (which once again, this doesn’t make sense given even minimum wage full-time jobs earn $14,500, and 50 million people report earnings of less than $15,000), we still get a marginally employed/unemployed rate of 25%: work force of 160 million, 121 million fully employed.
I think his point is that the unemployment numbers don’t include those who quit looking for a job. Wonder how many of those are on welfare.
Prob not 42%, def not 5.1%
Of course, CNN wants to ignore those who have given up. I'm surprised they don't argue that we should only count people who actively looked for work the previous business day.
This might get people to start thinking about how the official unemployment number is calculated. They may see it is a farce.....
or not..
Trump did NOT state that unemployment was at 40%. He merely stated that ONE EXPERT told him it could be as high as 40%.
Trump did say that the 5-6% being touted by the government was a joke (and I think we all agree there). Trump said that he thought it was closer to 20%.
So Trump said it was more around 20% - not 40%!
Again, the MSM is trying to construct a false narrative and even people here are falling for it.
It matters little WHY some one is not working at a job. What does matter is that he/she must be supported by tax dollars from those who do bother to drag their azz to work every day. Because most of those without job are not independently wealthy. Most receive free assistance from government.
Since government does not have a money tree, others who work must carry the load via higher taxes.
Unemployment is at 5.1 percent and HOW MANY people are on food stamps? welfare? housing assistance?
should be slashed dramatically compared to 6 years ago...
We are only 20 trillion is debt. What could possibly be wrong?
Every unemployed person who heard him mention a possible 42% figure said to themselves “I believe it!”
It’s the stupid 5.1% number that they don’t believe.
Quibbling. Lead pipe cinch the REAL unemployment figure is a lot closer to 42% than it is to 5%.
"On Monday, he claimed he'd seen numbers that show America's real unemployment rate is as high as 42%."
The article’s title doesn’t necessarily compliment Trump’s claim.
Trump said it’s around 25% or thereabouts on CNN tonight.
The real unemployment rate is certainly not 5.1%.
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, if you count government “workers”, that’s probably a pretty accurate number...
Over 55 labor Force participation
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11324230
No change during the recession.
25-54
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU01300060
Still declining ! What recovery ? The peak was @ 1999-2000 and never got back to that. Note, that this kept rising through multiple recessions - women working explains most of that.
16-24
http://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11324887Q;jsessionid=683DE9B4C714291A8102BA764782CAD5.tc_instance6
This all is not a recent phenomenon, particularly the fall in youth employment, but the latest recession has been particularly bad and there is no evidence of a recovery.
Obama is not entirely to blame, there are things going on here that predate him, but he hasn’t helped.