Where Are the Missing Five Million Workers?

[Selatius]

5. If you are unemployed and have been discouraged for more than a year, you're removed.

You are not showing up in the unemployment numbers.

The popularly followed unemployment measure reported in the media is the U3 unemployment index, which is hovering around 8%.

The U6 unemployment index is the broadest measure of unemployment reported by the BLS.

To date, that index stands at just under 15% unemployment.

However, if you added in back all those workers who have both depleted their unemployment insurance and have been discouraged for more than a year, you're looking at a number that could be far north of just 15%. The most pessimistic numbers are numbers around the 20% unemployment range. If true, you're in a job market not much better than during the Great Depression. The only major difference is that unlike then, people have Social Security, food stamps, low income housing, and other programs to help them scrape by.

These programs are preventing the misery from being worse than what it already is, and some are seeking to destroy this safety net.

If they want people to starve to death on the streets like they did back in 1932, so be it. They'll just do nothing but antagonize an already angry and desperate workforce, and the people might do something "stupid" and try another Franklin Roosevelt out of sheer desperation, and if the people are truly ignorant and self-destructive, they'll elect somebody who thinks Adolf Hitler's solution to the Great Depression was a good idea: Mobilization and the waging of war.