yes its beauty too: 23 million unemployed and his communist health care is about to be declared illegal and anti American.
Except there is nowhere near 23 million unumployed. There are approx 12.3 million unemployed, seasonally adjusted up to 12.7 million. You're including people not trying to work and people who have jobs, but not working as many hours as they'd like.
yes its called U-6 it reflects the true state of BO's depression. Its the number Krugman uses since its plain Nazi- like to lie about what's really going on
Well, the U-6 is useful for looking at the full range of the labor market and how much it could be expanded, but it's NOT a measure of Unemployment. Let's look at the breakdown, using the not seasonally adjusted numbers (to keep things simple, as Marginally Attached aren't seasonally adjusted).
Unemployed: 12,271,000 people currently trying to work. These tell us the actual conditions of the Labor Market...people trying and failing to find work.
Marginally Attached: 2,423,000 people who are willing and able to work, looked in last year, but not last month, and stopped looking mostly due to personal reasons: family obligations, school/training, injury/illness/pregnancy, though the largest single sub-group is discouragement. These are NOT Unemployed because they cannot be employed as they're not trying to work. Useful to look at as people who MIGHT start looking soon and avaialble to join the labor force. Discouraged are useful for PERCEPTION of the Labor Market, but not for the actual conditions. The rest of the Marginally attached are useful as POTENTIAL workers.
Part time for Economic Reasons: 7,837,000 people willing and able to work 35+ hrs/week but working less than that, mostly due to cut hours but also due to not being able to find full time work. Useful for looking at market conditions as companies will cut hours before laying off people in many cases. Closest measure to Underemployment available. But these people are EMPLOYED. You can't call them unemployed.
Take the case of Person A and Person B doing the same job for the same employer. A works 30 hrs a week because that's the desired number of hours. B works 36 hrs/week (officially full time). Times get difficult and the employer cuts B's hours to 30 hrs/week. So now A and B are doing the same job for the same employer for the same number of hours, but you'd call A Employed and B Unemployed as B is Part time for Economic Reasons. Not exactly an objective measure of unemployment. Definitely useful to look at overall market conditions, but not "unemployed."