Sixteen percent of Americans are actually out of work, according to Atlanta Federal Reserve chief Dennis Lockhart. That figure compares with the official July jobless rate reported by the government as 9.4 percent.

Speaking to the Chamber of Commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Wednesday, Lockhart explained the discrepancy:

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.

“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

Sean Hannity reports:

The situation may be even worse than the estimate by Lockhart, according to our own research. The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the unemployment rate each month based on interviews with 60,000 households including 110,000 individuals (out of a population of 307,297,404 at the time of this writing). These folk respond to interviews with “2,200 highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees.”

As a result of a fixed set of questions, the respondents are divided into three groups:

• People with jobs are employed.
• People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
• People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.

Those “not in the labor force” include all children under sixteen, adults attending school, homemakers, retired persons, those institutionalized in prisons or asylums, and the incapacitated.

Certainly there is wiggle room in estimates extrapolated from small sample size, especially in the hands of politically motivated bureaucrats who are in a position to “massage the data.” Moreover, the survey counts everyone who helped a few hours in a family business without pay as employed. And what even Lockhart has not taken into account is the fact that the census does not distinguish foreigners with legal status and illegal aliens, a demographic that is “in country” specifically for jobs. The percentage of deserving United States citizens who are unemployed is obviously higher than even the 16% figure, when employed aliens are subtracted from the mix.

Add to this these facts:

• Our population is on average aging, with the number of retired persons increasing and the proportion of workers decreasing.
• Our national debt obligations (to China and others) are growing exponentially from interest owed.
• Our national debt is growing in an unpredictable way from the government spending spree into the incalculable trillions.
• Productivity and tax revenues are overall declining.

One must conclude that our feckless government has plunged the nation into an almost inescapable downward economic spiral.

Reference:

U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — How the Government
Measures Unemployment