by John Nichols, The Nation
America already has double-digit unemployment.
In fact, the real unemployment rate, as opposed to the official rate, is well over 15 percent.
That’s because the official unemployment rate — which as of Friday stood at at 9.4 percent, following another leap in jobless claims for May — is not, as economic John Williams has noted, “figured in the way that that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression.”
What happens when we include people who have stopped looking for work because they do not believe there are jobs to be found, along with part-time workers who would like to be working full time?
Then, we start looking not at the unsettling 10 percent figure but the far more frightening 20 percent number.
As economist Howard Rosen told NPR after official unemployment topped 8 percent in February: “Today we learned that there are 12.5 million people who are unemployed, and we have another 8.6 million people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs. Now, you’re talking about 20 million people in this country who are either unemployed or underemployed. I don’t want to freak out people, but the unemployed number, we start talking about 15, 16 percent.”
Since February, of course, the official unemployment rate has spiked dramatically, as has the real rate.
These are the numbers that make an urgent social and economic case for the additional stimulus that my wise colleagues and other concerned commentators are suggesting.
But it is the smaller official rate that makes the political case for both more stimulus and a radical rethink of the Obama administration’s ill-thought auto bankruptcy and bailout scheme.
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