I promise this isn’t just becoming a Donald Trump blog. Though it would be a way to get more traffic.

Trump is one of two candidates in the race, along with the person I actually support, Bernie Sanders, who is observing the flaws in the current methodology for calculating unemployment. Unfortunately, both Donald and Bernie are focusing on underemployment as a facet of unemployment, which is mixing apples and oranges and undermines the strength of the argument that unemployment, meaning joblessness, is actually 11.52%.

They’ve been popularizing the often-touted “U-6” unemployment figure, which includes both discouraged workers, captured in my Real Unemployment figure month to month on this blog, along with workers who are part-time but would rather be full-time. Don’t get me wrong, these underemployed workers matter and are part of a larger picture of an unhealthy and overrated jobs market. But they are categorically better off than people who have left or never entered the labor force and are thus not only ineligible for part-time work income, but for unemployment benefits of any kind.

Definitions from the BLS website:

Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

What’s amazing is that this inclusion itself nearly doubles the unemployment rate, from 5.3% to 10.4%. And yet this includes zero people who are actually outside of the labor force. And as we know, the labor force as a percentage of population is at a 38-year low, dating back to a time when it was still somewhat novel for women to be working regularly. That was October 1977, before I was born, when the Seattle Mariners had just completed their first season of existence, during Jimmy Carter’s first year in the White House.

By my calculations, factoring in just the truly unemployed, including those who’ve fled or been barred from the labor force, unemployment in July 2015 was unchanged at 11.52%. The Reporting Gap, measuring those left out by the ignorance of how labor force percentages impact unemployment, was also unchanged at an all-time high of 6.22%.

Here are your charts:

If you add the difference between traditional U-3 unemployment and the U-6 figure that Trump and Sanders like back to the real figure of 11.52%, you get 16.62%. This is roughly how, I assume, Trump got the basis for his claim that he made during his announcement speech:

“Our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent. Don’t believe the 5.6. Don’t believe it.”
-Donald Trump, 16 June 2015

So I like where he’s going with that, but I think, like so many things Trump says and does, it’s a little exaggerated and more than a little mixed. Though 16.62% is really not that far from 18-20%, which is more than an alleged fact-checker like Politifact gave him credit for. Of course, Politifact makes irresponsible claims like this:

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume that half the additional increase in people out of the labor force comes from the Baby Boom retirement surge.”
-Politifact’s Louis Jacobson, 16 June 2015

We don’t have to just ballpark for the sake of argument. We can calculate this statistic based on data the BLS collects. And the fact is that Baby Boomers are delaying retirement because of the Great Recession, not fleeing the labor force. The Baby Boomers are responsible for 7.5% of the labor force drainage, as of October 2014, which I think you’ll agree is a bit shy of 50%.

Trump may be crazy and mixing his numbers. But if Trump and Sanders win their respective nominations, maybe the media will finally have to pay attention to the reality of the delusion that goes into reporting our unemployment figures in this country.

This is part of a continuing series on the under-reporting of unemployment in the United States of America.

Past posts (months indicate the month being analyzed – the post is in the month following):
June 2015
March 2015
February 2015
December 2014 – labor force participation assessment
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014 – age assessment
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
April 2014
December 2013 – seasonal assessment
December 2013
March 2013*
August 2012*
July 2012* – age assessment
July 2012*

*My initial analyses led to a slight over-reporting of the impact of the reporting gap, so the assessments in these posts are inflated, as explained and corrected in the December 2013 analysis.