I’m retired. I have no desire to go back to work. I don’t know what the cutoff is, but I’m under 65.
I’m still trying to figure out the huge number of people in their mid to late 20s hanging around the coffee shop all day with their iPads. How do they survive? Mom and dad’s credit cards?
Normally you do not collect food stamps on retirement. There are about 110M people on food stamps. 95M that collected their unemployment and are no longer in the workforce should be counted as unemployed.
The say you can torture statistics until they say anything you want them to say.
I’m 75, retired, and still working 6 or 7 days/week. I need the money for all my doctors, medicine, and charities. I’m doing a job that no one else can do. They are not teaching kids stem subjects any more. I would be a fool to give up $100 grand/year.
That 95 million is every person in the U.S. over the age of 16 who is not in the military and not institutionalized in some way. So it included retirees, students, stay at home moms, and those who do not work by choice as well as those who are unemployed.
I see no mention of stay-at-home moms. That is probably the largest group. If you have two or three children, you have a full-time job right there!
Too much free money out there. Hunger is a great motivation to get off your ass and go to work.
In college or graduate schools of all types (medicine law etc), housewives (or husbands) out of the workforce, all retirees, people working “off the books” people in explicitly criminal enterprises
I’m in my 70’s and recently retired. I’m shocked at the number of working aged people in the various malls etc. you can tell they aren’t independently wealth, but they seem to have money to spend.
I retired but haven’t been looking for a job. How do they count me?
Such as...
"Taken together, the numbers show that there's more to meets the eye than a headline unemployment rate of 4.6 percent, the lowest since August 2007. Because that number ignores those not in the labor force, as well as workers at part-time jobs for economic reasons, it doesn't tell the whole story. A broader jobless measure is at 9.3 percent."
And this..
""I have a problem with people saying we're at full employment," said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes North America, a trade credit insurance company. "We have a record 95 million people sitting on the sidelines. To me, that's hardly full employment.""
It’s a pretty secure job if you don’t mind low pay.
Might as damn well not be employed at $10 an hour. IMVHO the statistics shouldn’t count anyone employed at or very close to min-wage because you make so little you’re permapoor after taxes and bills gobble up 80%-90% of your income; there’s nothing to use for entrepreneurship or home ownership or a family so you’re right out there on the margins of productive society.
Ever day I call my parents and thank them for making me do good in school when I was young. I don’t tell them I use my college diploma as a dartboard.
The bottom line on this is that the government has, for political purposes, designated a massive swath of the population as non-persons, people who simply don’t matter and therefore aren’t counted.
Next door neighbor, engineer, layed off 9 months ago, searches for employment daily. Hopes that oil & gas jobs will become available under Trump. With him there are thousands on the streets in Houston. Their big hope is that business will pick up when the country gears up to become energy independent.
When Obunghole killed the NASA return to the moon effort in 2010, it killed my job. I was already sick of the chasing of contracts in engineering, so just hung it up at 62.