The Real Unemployment Rate

So exactly how many people are unemployed these days in the United states? Well if you go by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (B.L.S.) they are currently putting the number officially at 10.2%. There is a little catch about this though. The catch has to do with the way they count people as "officially unemployed." For example if you are not currently looking for a job because you are totally discouraged by the current state of the job market then you are not counted as "officially unemployed" because you are technically not looking. The B.L.S. calls this not being "officially in the labor market." Another kind of accounting trick that it uses is to count under employed individuals as employed. For example, if you lost your full time job due to an industry down sizing and the only thing you could find in the meantime is part time work say working in a Home Depot a few hours a week the B.L.S. counts you as "Officially Employed" even though you would not be making enough money to live on. They only count people that they consider are "actively looking." If you do not currently have a job and you looked in a classified section this week for a job then you are considered "officially unemployed" because you have looked for a job but have not found one. If you take away all the accounting tricks so to speak and count all the people in the country who are really unemployed then the unemployment rate would not look like the 10.2% that the B.L.S. puts it at currently but more like 17.5% which is almost 1 in 5 people in the whole country. Oh by the way, 1 in 5 people was about the same rate of unemployment during the Great Depression. It was roughly about 75-80% employed and 20-25% unemployed at that time give or take.