Official Unemployment Rate Fails To Include 5.4 Million Americans

As the 2024 election approaches, the deeply unpopular Biden administration continues to emphasize statistics designed to present its economic policies as a net benefit for the American people.

One of the most commonly cited figures is the official unemployment rate, which has remained low throughout President Joe Biden’s term and was most recently determined to be 3.6%. A caveat found deep in June’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, however, indicates that this number does not accurately reflect how many Americans are currently out of work.

In fact, roughly 5.4 million individuals who are “not in the labor force” but “currently want a job” were not included “because they were not actively looking for work during the four weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job,” the report acknowledged.

The agency requires job-seekers to make “specific active efforts to find employment” during the surveyed period in order to be included in the official unemployment statistics.

Additional details served to paint a gloomier economic picture than the 3.6% unemployment rate would suggest, including the fact that about 18.5% of those counted as unemployed — roughly 1.1 million Americans — are listed as long-term unemployed, which means that they have not been able to find a job for at least 27 weeks. 

Furthermore, the report concluded that a growing number of individuals have been forced to take part-time jobs. This number was 452,000 higher in June, pushing the total to 4.2 million.

“Persons employed part time for economic reasons are individuals who would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs,” the BLS indicated.

Recent polling suggests that most Americans are not convinced by the Biden administration’s glowing reports that the U.S. economy is strong.

A somewhat more transparent figure is 62.6%, which is the latest labor force participation rate and falls short of where former President Donald Trump’s economy was prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

One potential bright spot, depending on one’s perspective, is job growth within the public sector. As Biden continues his mission of expanding the federal bureaucracy, the number of government jobs has increased significantly this year.

Thus far in 2023, the average number of new jobs in this sector has hovered around 63,000 per month, more than twice the 23,000 government jobs added to the economy on average each month last year.