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Monday, January 30, 2017

Trump mulls changing official unemployment rate

President Trump is considering a move that would increase the official unemployment rate by a full point, and it's an idea that many liberals would be OK with.

That's because it wouldn't involve any workers losing their jobs. Rather, the new administration is considering switching the calculation the Labor Department uses as the official unemployment rate in place of a broader definition of what constitutes unemployment.

It's not a bad idea, said Heidi Shierholz, until recently the Labor Department's chief economist. Done properly, the change might give a better, more complex portrait of what is going on in the economy, she said. In any event, it wouldn't do any harm. "It would not be that the unemployment rate has actually jumped. We'd just be using a different set of data to calculate it," she said.

The Labor Department releases numbers on national unemployment every month, most recently stating that the official rate was 4.7 percent. Most news stories echoed that figure, but it was actually only one of six calculations the department releases each month, each using a slightly different definition of unemployed. The numbers are collectively known as U-1 through U-6.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We all know the numbers over the past eight years were false!!

Anonymous said...

So the number changes and Trump will be blamed for higher unemployment rate by the liberals.

Anonymous said...

If you want to do this, do it immediately with a Complete explanation as to why the number will increase...otherwise the DEMS will totally blame Pres. Trump.

Anonymous said...

If trump changes the way unemployment is figured and it shows more unemployed the MSM will say the amount of unemployed has gone up since Trump took office. They will blame it all on him when in fact all he is doing is correcting the democrats lies.

Anonymous said...

It will reveal the management of statistics by the dumbocrats over the last eight years!

Transparency under Trump!