Saturday, October 5, 2013

IBD Poll Puts Unemployment At 31%: 47.9 Million Looking For Work, 2 Times Higher Than BLS U6 Level



Investor's Business Daily has been polling Americans each month on the job market for well over a decade. Unlike the numbers released each month by the Labor Department, ours haven't been crunched, tweaked, twisted, seasonally adjusted or otherwise tortured to tell a comforting story. ... In our IBD/TIPP Poll, we ask a different question: "How many members of your household are currently unemployed and are looking for employment?" Not surprisingly, the answer we get differs greatly from the government's data. This month's survey, completed Thursday night, indicated that 47.9 million Americans are looking for work. No, that's not a misprint: 47.9 million. Out of a workforce of 154 million, that yields a gross unemployment rate of 31%. Among all households, 26% have at least one member looking for work.

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The U6 unemployment rate of 13.7% in August is the combination of the officially unemployed, 11.3 million, the marginally attached to the labor force, 2.3 million, and the part-time for economic reasons, 7.9 million. That comes to 21.5 million unemployed in August by the broadest official government measure. The IBD poll puts the level 2.23 times higher than that at 47.9 million.