Nearly 102 million working-age Americans jobless
Although the US unemployment rate has declined, more and more Americans are choosing to opt out of the labor market altogether and no longer even figure in the employment data.
If you add the current number of Americans without a job (9.75 million) to the number of US citizens not in the labor force (92.02), you come up with 101.77 million working age Americans who do not have work, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Now compare that figure to April 2000, when 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and 69.27 million Americans were not participating in the labor market. The number of Americans 14 years ago without work was 74.75 million. That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000. However Washington wishes to fudge data that is bad news for the Obama administration.
In January 2005, the month that Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the United States was struggling with its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Just 60.6 percent of all working age Americans enjoyed employment of some kind.
Soup Kitchens and Breadlines
By early 1933, more than 12 million people, or 25 percent of eligible Americans, were unemployed.
Since just 58.9 percent of all working age Americans presently have employment, the US job picture remains in worse condition than it was when Barack Obama entered office.
Michael Snyder, who contributes to The Economic Collapse blog, suggested that the United States “just define every American that is not working as ‘not in the labor force’ and then we can have ‘0.0 percent unemployment.’”
“Then we can all have a giant party and celebrate how wonderful the US economy is.”
The unemployment data comes on the heels of another report, released last week, that 20 percent of all American families in 2013 do not have a single member that is working, according to BLS.
The BLS defines a family as “a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage.”
In 2013, of the estimated 80,445,000 families in the United States, in 20 percent – or 16,127,000— of them none of the members was employed.
Soup Kitchens and Breadlines
At the height of the Great Depression, half of all American families were living below subsistence levels.
Soup Kitchens and Breadlines
In 1931, hundreds of people line up for the Christmas dinner at the New York Municipal Lodging House.
Soup Kitchens and Breadlines
By 1933, nearly 11,000 banks had failed, destroying the life savings of millions of Americans.
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