Dunstan Prial at FOX Business echoed what Professor Robert Reich told us in his All Fool’s Day article. “Time to Focus on the Real Unemployment Rate” is how he began his report.

“Forget the official 8.2% unemployment rate,” Dunstan writes. “Take a hard look instead at what’s known as the U6 rate, which tracks not only those out of work but those who’ve essentially given up looking for work. That rate stands at about 14.5%, or nearly double the official unemployment rate. As economists digest the disappointing job numbers released last Friday – just 120,000 jobs added in March, well below expectations – some say the U6 figure is the data point people should be focused on.

“The official figure used by the Labor Department ‘leaves out a lot of people who’ve just given up,’ said Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. The U6 number is derived from a household survey that includes people who are actually unemployed as well as those who haven’t looked for work in over four weeks, Mathur explained.

“‘If you’re unemployed and you haven’t been looking for work in the previous four weeks then you’re not considered part of the official unemployed,’ she said. The U6 rate, meanwhile, ‘includes all (??) of those people who are too discouraged to look for work’…

“Mathur said about 43% of the 12.8 million Americans officially labeled out of work fall into the category of the long-term unemployed, ‘which is huge, we’ve never seen those kinds of numbers in any recession,’ she said …

“‘The tremendous difference in this recession has been the long-term unemployed. The labor market hasn’t recovered at all.'” –

First of all, this “recession” isn’t a recession. It’s a full-fledged depression. Professor Reich reminded us that the labor market is far from healthy – the country’s job deficit is still mammoth, he said. The working-age population has grown by nearly 10 million since the “recession” officially began in December of 2007, he writes, but many of those people never entered the work force. But that December 2007 date is hogwash. That’s the date Ben Bernanke is giving out to folks who still think he knows what he’s talking about. The truth of the matter is, he’s on record as saying – back in the Spring of 2006 – that the “recession” was already underway. He’s since fudged the date and advanced it by about 22 months, yet very few analysts noticed the deception or cared to call him on it. So what else is new? He fudges everything and gets away with it.

So if 10 million youngsters attained working-age since December 2007, but haven’t been able to find a job, and if the “recession” actually began about 22 months prior to that, that means some 14,000,000 young people have never been included in the Labor Department’s “household surveys”.
[12.8 million “officially” unemployed + 14 million youngsters = a full-fledged depression.]