Statistics can tell whatever story that the disseminators of want to tell or spin for the general consumption of the public, further to the point, the repetition of such information, or misinformation, often enough and pervasive enough, has a tendency to get accepted as of relevance to many people. A case in point, the unemployment rate for America has consistently been perceived as low in recent years, even considered to be at a rate that reflects "full employment" even though the reality of the situation in the lives of those that surround us postulates that this could not possibly be true. The reason that this is so, the reason that what we perceive does not reflect these positive statistics must be because the statistics being foisted upon us are not a true reflection of the real unemployment rate.
The most prevalent unemployment rate, talked about and most sited is the unemployment rate, U3, which is defined as the unemployment rate of people that are without jobs but have actively looked for work within the past four weeks, which not only seems incredibly arbitrary, but almost senseless, for human nature has a strong tendency to give up, when they fail at the same activity, in this case, achieving employment, again and again, which U3, does not measure. A truer reflection of what unemployment actually means is to take into account, discouraged workers, that are people that want to work but have essentially actively given up finding work, as well as other workers that would in general like to work, but haven't been seeking anything recently, as well as part-time workers, that want to work full-time but are unable to find additional employment or the means to accomplish such. All these additional categories are classified as U6, of which this unemployment rate far exceeds the official figure that the pundits use in the media. So that, the current unemployment rate of U3 as of August, 2017, is 4.4%, whereas the unemployment rate of U6 as of August, 2017, is 8.6%, which is a considerable difference. Additionally, from 2009 to 2015 the U6 unemployment rate was in double digits for each of those years, signifying, that our eyes do not lie to us, that rather than America being fully employed, it really is not.
In addition, there is another meaningful category of employment, which is the labor participation rate, which is the percentage of people that are employed as compared to all those who are unemployed, of which those that are retired, students, or taking care of children or other familial responsibilities are not included within this number, so that this number reflects those that are employed in the labor force as compared to those that have the capability to work but are not working. The labor force percentage rate has been in a long term decline over the last ten years, in which the labor participation rate fell from 66.4% in January, 2007, to 62.9% in August, 2017, indicating that not only has the percentage of Americans in the labor pool that are working dropped significantly, but that the number of employed Americans has stagnated for its "growth" over the last decade is at an anemic overall rate of 5.12%, as compared to a population growth during this same period of 8.08%.
The declining labor participation rate, in conjunction with a real U6 unemployment rate which only recently declined to 8.6% reflects that a huge swath of Americans are effectively wards of the state, underemployed, unemployed, poor, disadvantaged, and completely out of reach of any significant part of the American dream, all this, despite the fact, that America is in aggregate the richest nation in the world, though America professes egalitarian sentiments, the distribution of its wealth, resides primarily inthe hands of the few, leaving a great balance of Americans, to lead lives of desperation, dissatisfaction and destroyed dreams.