Original URL where the cowards have changed the title now: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464
I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Any fucking questions
Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was
“The economy is so good guys.”
“Why can’t I afford to eat?”
“Shut up I said the economy is good, OK?!”
The actual unemployment rate being nearly 24% makes me actually nauseous
Do you have some reading about where or how you came to that conclusion? I’m not overly doubting you, I’m excited to read.
]:;
It’s the article I’m replying too here. (Also the top comment has a link to a site the writer has made which tracks it over time)
Crap, I’m an idiot. I speed-read part of the description and just now properly read it.
It happens. Steve Bannon’s flood the zone is a deliberate tactic.
Unemployment is sucha bullshit thing to measure tbh. I work in the unemployment sector and 95% of people I see are on and off the job again, working shit jobs for low wages for two weeks, getting benefits for the other two weeks of the months. They live in poverty.
They are not included in the long time unemployment category though. But there is nothing great about their situation.
Hey, you described me, but it’s more like a hustle here a hustle there.
Yeah, figuring out the actual unemployment in capitalism is a fucking joke.
I think measuring the unemployment in a socialist country is typically way more accurate, and China’s unemployment rate is relatively low at roughly 4-5 percent.
Someone better check on Will Stancil.
Liberals when asked to side with imperialism, colonization, exploitation: 👍
Liberals when asked to do virtually anything else:
I wish I’d gotten my shit together a lot sooner, but it’s spilled milk now. Onward!
I get that and kudos for having a forward-moving mindset about it. Sometimes I’m not as patient as I should be with others, especially knowing how briefly I’ve known better compared to how long I’ve been a grown adult and could have if I’d been exposed to the right information and worked it out. But we all come from different places and it’s not a contest, after all. Once we know better, we can start to do better, and that’s exponentially more helpful than being in the way.
The main thing is solidarity. We tease out the largest knots first and tease out the smaller ones once that work is done.
The government creates the U4 thu U6 categories and these fucking dorks don’t ever look at any number that shows them something they don’t want to see
Didn’t homelessness go up by 18% or something similar? On top of that, people having to work a part-time job on top of a full-time job tends to pad the labor statistics for sure.
You see if someone is working two jobs that negates one person not having a job, think about it.
I remember reading about the “true unemployment rate” a while back, I always go there to check the rate instead of that 4% number. So ridiculous.
EDIT: Looks like it’s from the author of that article! Anyways yeah it’s a running counter
Going by the graph at that link, the “true unemployment” has been as low as it’s ever been for the past few years. I guess I don’t understand the point of the article in the OP.
I don’t think the decades-long trend is as important as:
- The real rate not meaningfully changing from 2020-2024,
- The rate still being high in absolute terms (1 in 4), and
- Democrats running as if the economy was not only doing well, but had improved significantly under Biden.
I haven’t flipped through the site a bunch, but I wonder if the higher historical rates are offset to a degree by lower costs of living in, say, 1995.
24% vs 4% is by estimations about a 40m person difference. That seems like an incredibly important point to get across
Yes, of course. I just don’t understand the framing of Democrats being tricked. Is it supposed to be apologia for the Democrats running campaigns that got Trump elected twice?
Democrat voters were uniformly tricked. Democrat politicians, who worked hard to elect Trump twice, were instrumental in doing the tricking. The point of the article is to explain the method by which the latter successfully tricked the former for decades.
