Michael Snyder: Don’t Believe Government Unemployment Numbers
The government and media may be singing a tune of low unemployment rates in America, but popular blogger and writer Michael Snyder says they are forgetting to add in one important factor that tells a much different story.
On April 5, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 3.8 percent, or 6.2 million Americans. Snyder, who blogs at theeconomiccollapseblog.com, says the number is more like 102 million Americans, a figure that is worse than at any point during the last U.S. recession.
The discrepancy, Snyder says, comes in the number of working-age Americans—approximately 95.577 million—who are not officially classified as in the labor force. And that, he says, makes a huge difference.
“When Americans don’t have a job, they got either into the category of being officially unemployed or not in the labor force,” Snyder told Dr. Steve Greene on a recent edition of “Greenelines” on the Charisma Podcast Network. “But in both cases, people don’t have a job. We’ve seen the number of officially unemployed go down, and one of the reasons for that is that they made it harder to get unemployment benefits.
“But meanwhile, [the number of] those not in the labor force has gone up and up and up. The number of those not in the labor force have been soaring to one all-time high after another. We’ve never really recovered from where we were before the last recession. If honest numbers were being used, the real rate of unemployment would be 21.2 percent. People are deeply concerned, and a lot of what is being said about how well the economy is doing is not really painting the entire picture.”
For more of Michael Snyder’s thoughts on the American economy, listen to the podcast below.
