Trump Wildly Inflates Unemployment

Trump Wildly Inflates Unemployment

By Lori Robertson at Factcheck


http://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/trump-wildly-inflates-unemployment/

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Donald Trump said he “heard” the unemployment rate was really 42 percent. It’s not. That figure would include retirees, teenagers, stay-at-home parents and anyone else who doesn’t need or want to work.

The unemployment rate is actually 4.9 percent for January.

If Trump wanted to include the underemployed (part-time workers wanting full-time work) and the “marginally attached” (those who have given up looking for a job but had looked for one in the past year), then he could use 9.9 percent as his number for the underemployed and the unemployed. That’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “U-6? measurement of labor underutilization, its most comprehensive statistic on those who are underemployed or unemployed but want to work.

We fact-checked Trump on this topic back in June, when he said in his speech announcing his presidential candidacy that the “real” unemployment rate is “anywhere from 18 to 20 percent” and “maybe even 21 percent.” He was wrong then. The only figure of 18 percent we found came from a University of Maryland economist who included “the effects of immigration,” he said, and the “many” students who are being “duped” into applying for “useless programs” at universities and for-profit schools.



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