Using Traditional Unemployment Measures In non-Traditional Times


I have been wondering why I am almost the only person in the world to notice this. When it takes, on average, two jobs per adult worker to make a living in the USA, does it make sense to call it full employment when each working adult has, on average, one job?

In the days when it only required one paid job per family to survive, it made sense to measure how many people were totally without work to understand how the economy was doing for the average person. Nowadays, every person could have one job, and we would have 0% unemployment by traditional measures but 50% underemployment when measuring how many people had enough work to make a living.

When was the last time you heard a news report on what percentage of the people did not have enough work to make a living?

Nobody wanted to tell people that creating 100s of thousands of low wage jobs per month during Obama’s term was not really a good record. Just shows that when you tell lies when you are in power, your opponents are given free reign to tell the same lies during their term. I always opposed the neo-liberals like Clinton and Obama when they used deception to brag about what they were doing. There is a reason why my parents always told me that honesty is the best policy.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.