Our unemployment is doctored the same way. Our U6 unemployment rate is 16%.
The fact is that raising minimum wage just above poverty level lowers unemployment & does not cause prices to rise or inflation.
Australia does not cook their unemployment numbers, neither do we. I'll ask again, like I always do, though I know I won't get an intelligent answer: How exactly are you claiming the US or Australia cooks/doctors/manipulates etc the Unemployment data?
From collection to dissemenation, what are you claiming is done? I know, I'll just get insults and assertions but no real answer.
Oh, and the U6 is 14.3%, not 16%.
Real unemployment numbers = all people of legal age who do not have a job.
Including those in prison, a mental institution, in a coma? Including full time students, retirees, stay home spouses, all others who don't want to work, can't work? What is the usefulness of that?
people who have given up looking for jobs
Are not unemployed because they are not trying to work and cannot be hired so do not tell us how difficult it is to get hired. These have never been considered unemployed.
people who have started their own businesses
They are Employed if they work in their own business.
people not counted because they do not receive unemployment subsidies
There are no such people. The definition of unemployed has nothing to do with benefits and has never been a consideration.
+demographic the government can get away with subtracting from the real numbers in order to make the real unemployment numbers lower).
Out of the Adult Civilian Non-Institutional Population (16 and older not in the military, prison, or other institution), there are around 90 million people who are neither employed not unemployed. Most (over 92%) say they don't want to work. Why do you consider them to be really unemployed?
Of those not working or trying to work who say they do want a job, over half haven't looked for work in over a year. How is that a reliable source of info about current labor market conditions?
Of the rest, who have looked in the last year, but not the last 4 weeks, 21% say they couldn't actually accept a job if offered.
So now we're down to the 2,588,000 Marginally Attached...those who say they want to work, are available to work, have looked in the last 12 months but not last 4 weeks.
They're not classified a unemployed because, well, they're not trying to work and therefore no more likely to be hired than those who don't want to work or can't work. There is an alternative measure of underutilization, the U5, that includes them (currently 9.2%) as they're useful to track as people who might start looking/participating in the labor market.
Most of the Marginally Attached stopped looking because of personal reasons such as family obligations, illness/injury, school, day care issues, no car, etc. That doesn't tell us anything about how hard or easy it is to find a job.
Some of the marginally attached, 885,000 are considered "discouraged:" they stopped looking because they believed there were no jobs available, that they didn't have the right training, education, genitalia, skin color, age, etc. BELIEF, not necessarily reality. We don't know what the truth is because they stopped trying. Theyre tracked in the U4 measure and that rate is 8.3%
Having a definition that fits what you want to know (how difficult/easy it is to actually get a job) is not "cooking" the books. The Ue rate is meant to measure how hard it is to get a job, not how many people aren't working. Those not trying to work don't tell us how difficult/easy it is and have never been considered unemployed.
I have no idea what you think the UE rate is supposed to measure. If you just want the percent of the population not working, that's easy: it's the inverse of the employment-population ratio. Currently, that's 58.6%, which means that 41.4% of the adult civilian non-institutional population do not have jobs.
