his policies. Trump's use of numbers is fluid and varies from day to day, depending on which Faux News program he is watching. He is paranoid, feckless and impulsive, a lying charlatan, who will say anything on the spur of the moment and then deny that he said it, claim it was a joke or he was misquoted, then send his minions out to translate what he really meant.


The government has one reliable source of factual data that is used throughout the country, and it comes from the CBO without prejudice or deception.

He reduced the time that people could receive unemployment benefits, which is a governing factor in determining the "unemployment rate" - I think it went from 52 to 26 weeks. Bingo, "unemployment" was cut in half.

He removed interest rates and energy costs from the calculation for inflation, which were the two biggest contributors to inflation back then. Bingo, "inflation" was reduced.

Then he turned to "reducing" income taxes. He reduced the RATES at which income tax was assessed, "reduced taxes". But at the same time he eliminated many normal deductions that had been in effect for years - biggest thing was credit card interest paid and "income averaging". Then he imposed and increased an unbelievable number of "fees", which are not normally considered taxes. He also imposed income tax on unemployment compensation - compensation that was funded by TAXES!

I was unemployed in 1981 when he "reduced" taxes - I paid more that year than the previous year when I was employed.

I think a lot of congressmen saw that as manipulation, and the way those rates were calculated going forward became pretty stable.

# Myth: "those who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits are not counted as unemployed. If they were counted, the official unemployment rate would be much higher" (you often hear this claim from the RepubliCONS and JPRers when a Democratic president is in the White House, and vice versa when a RepubliCON is in the White House).

# Fact: The count of the unemployed and the unemployment rate is NOT a count of those receiving unemployment benefits, nor is unemployment benefit receiver status factored at all into any of the official national unemployment rate statistics (U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6). Rather, the national unemployment rate is based on a survey of 60,000 households chosen at random. See: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm (and search the page for the word "insurance&quot .

People in the survey are counted as unemployed (and thus part of the official (U3) unemployment rate) if they are jobless and looked for work some time in the past 4 weeks. They are counted as unemployed in the U4, U5, and U6 statistics if they looked for work some time in the past 12 months. It has nothing at all to do with whether they are collecting unemployment benefits or not, or how long they have been unemployed.

There was a small change in the official unemployment rate methodology in 1994 --

In the old survey, the official rate was called U-5, and in the new one it is called U-3, but they both are almost identical -- principally that the jobless person must have looked for work sometime in the past 4 weeks. Anyway they say they estimate that with the redesigned questionnaire the official unemployment rate was increased by about 0.2 percentage points in the new survey compared to the old. (p. 26 column A of http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf )

The above gives a history of the changes going back to 1948.

See also for a synopsis of the above:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141009906#post67

The big changes were in the alternate measures of unemployment (today's U4 - U6).

Uh-huh.



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Trump or his minions can just claim anything he says was a joke whenever the shit hits the fans.

They really are like middle-schoolers.

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Especially when he seems to have no sense of humor. Wars have started over a country's leader's "jokes."

Last edited Mon Mar 13, 2017, 08:53 PM - Edit history (2)

They count every jobless person who has looked for work in the past 4 weeks as officially unemployed (U3 - the headline statistic). No matter how long it has been since they were last employed.

The alternative BLS measures of unemployment (U-4 thru U-6) count everyone that has looked for work in the past 12 months. No matter how long it has been since they last worked.

If you count every jobless person age 16+ who says they want a job, no matter how long it has been since they looked for work or had a job, the figure was 11.6% in January (that figure includes part-timers who say they want full-time work). Sucks but it's a lot less than the 23% or 40% that the Trumpistas and the JPRs (here and elsewhere) tout by citing a figure that counts happily retired centenarians as "unemployed".

See: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm (and search the page for the word "insurance&quot