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Half of all Americans are out of work

Government bureaucrats say the unemployment rate last month was 4.2%. Donald Trump says the real unemployment rate was 7.9%.

Please. In August the United States had 161 million workers out of a total population of 337 million. That's an unemployment rate of 52.1%.

Why won't the lamestream media tell you that more than half of all Americans are out of work? Even Donald Trump is afraid to tell the real truth. Wake up, sheeple!

42 thoughts on “Half of all Americans are out of work

  1. Yehouda

    OT: Why do people continue to use Xitter for these things? Can't they put these stuff also on other platform (e.g. threads), so people that want to stay away from anything related to the top asshole on the planet can actually stay away?

    1. chaboard

      Your question answers itself.....we use Twitter for these things because we can't find these things on the other platforms. Chicken/egg.

      The failure of the Twitter 'leavers' to consolidate on one platform (Threads! BlueSky! Mastodon! etc) left ALL of them below the critical mass user base needed to create an actual replacement

      It sucks but that's where we are.

      1. Joel

        "The failure of the Twitter 'leavers' to consolidate on one platform (Threads! BlueSky! Mastodon! etc) . . . "

        You forgot Truth Social (aka Trump Pravda)

    1. martinmc

      Kevin is feeding the AI scrapebots to see how quickly they incorporate this information into whatever AI platform they're from.

    2. Lounsbury

      In general I think such sarcasm actually does not work - so generally a poor idea overall (of course it is his personal blog for his personal plesure so I do understand writing for one's own pleasure entirely, thus shall not be preachy to Drum...)

    3. memyselfandi

      Except this is about the only time that Trump had a valid point. Trump is quoting the U6 unemployment number, a much better number than the u3 (which isn't worth the paper it's written on). If one wants to compare US unemployment to the numbers from other countries, the U6 is more similar to how they calculate theirs. (Better if they left out the involuntary part timers though i.e. U5.)

      1. Yehouda

        Since when people say "unemployment rate" they mean the U3 unemployment rate, to refer to the U6 umeployment rate, you need to say "U6 unemployment rate". Without "U6", it is the U3 one (because that is how people understand it).

        Saying that Trump was refering to the U6 one is just saying that his lie this time was a little more sophisticated than usual. It is still a lie.

        1. memyselfandi

          Trump explicitly said the "real unemployment number". That clearly means he's not talking about the worthless U3 number. And it is in fact common to refer to the U6 number as the real unemployment number. If you want to attack Trump, it would be for not including the context that the real unemployment number has averaged over 10% for the last 50 years so 7.9% is an excellent number.

          1. Yehouda

            You have a point, but it is not so strong.
            Most of people would still interpret "real unemployment number" to mean something like "real value for what is normally reported as "unemployment number"", and not think about U6 at all.
            Unless he actually followed it by explaining what he means, it is still a lie (a little more sophisticated than usual).

          2. Aleks311

            whatever number one uses it does need to be kept consistent for comparison over time. Comparing today's U6 to 2018's U3 is fraudulent statistics.

  2. kylemeister

    Indeed, why is Trump merely (apparently) citing U6, when he could go back to something like his 2015/16 claim that real unemployment is as high as 42%?

  3. Joseph Harbin

    In my own life, I've found this chart to be about right. We have one full-time worker in our household (not me), and one full-time slacker (not my wife). That puts our unemployment rate at 50%.

    That sounds bad but it used to be worse. Before my son went off to school (2 1/2 weeks ago), our unemployment rate was 67%. We are doing so much better than before.

    This economy rocks and that's why I'm voting for Team Blue.

      1. memyselfandi

        The number Trump is stating is not made up but the U6 number, routinely referred to as the real unemployment number, as Trump did here. This is the near impossible case of Trump not lying.

        1. mudwall jackson

          this site ain't generating a dime for kevin and sn't intended to. more of a hobby or habit he can't break, to our good fortune.

  4. bbleh

    I swear I wouldn't be surprised to hear him blurt something like this out in his next jabber-stream. Of course it would be ignored or sanitized.
    Trump Decries Unemployment Rate
    Cites Atypical But Valid Statistics
    Why Democrats Should Worry: An Analysis

  5. shapeofsociety

    This perfectly matches the experience of my own household. My 30-something self and 50-something stepdad are employed, my 70-something mother and my baby are not.

  6. Dana Decker

    Nice try, Kevin. You almost succeeded, but failed in one critical area. Those final words must be in all caps:

    WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

  7. Austin

    Conservatives’ allegedly ideal world would have a 67+% unemployment rate. Each household would have a breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother and at least 1 child = 67% unemployment. Throw that in their face when they bitch about unemployment somehow being too high… their own vision for a perfect Godly world implies an overall unemployment rate of like 70-90%, depending on how many kids the Lord blesses each home with.

      1. iamr4man

        Once they get all of those 20 million illegal aliens and and assorted other undesirables out of the country we will need the cheap labor opening a path to get those freeloading 8 year olds off TikTok and back into the factories and mines where they belong.

  8. cld

    Listening to Donald Trump speak, it always has the character of a long, extended wet fart.

    As says here,

    https://www.rawstory.com/trump-bette-midler-threat-wisconsin-rally/

    . . . .
    "I better win or you're gonna have problems like we've never had. We may have no country left," Trump said at his weekend swing-state rally. "This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This could be our last election."
    . . . .

    His future is prison and death, and it's really sinking in.

  9. Justin

    Why do people believe this nonsense?

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/07/why-the-kremlin-loves-social-media-00177759

    Before social media, they had a lot of difficulties penetrating the Western media. It happened, but not so often. So social media has been a useful tool for Russia to spread its propaganda. They were the first ones to actually utilize social media to do these kinds of mass disinformation campaigns and information operations, and they had a really good head start in that sense. It took the Western media and intelligence services years to figure out the whole thing.

    Social media is a catastrophe… a crisis! 😂

    You can create huge volume by using AI. So for example, what Russian operatives have done is create fake news sites or blogs, and the content on these blogs is completely generated by AI, but sometimes they inject Russian narratives or propaganda manually. There are hundreds of these blogs. Also, of course, they use the traditional system of bots and trolls to then make these stories seem much bigger. It’s kind of this multilevel system, and sometimes one of the superspreader accounts can pick up the story, and then it really goes viral. It’s a very sophisticated system that is still not very well understood.

    Fake blogs!

    1. OldFlyer

      One reason they believe- Take a bow Rupert.

      Kevin said it before- years ago, an out of context or blatantly false statement maybe made page 4 in the papers. Today, Fox gives the guy a 15 minute interview.

      They saw it on Fox so it must be true.

      1. mudwall jackson

        they believe it because they want to believe it. when trump said he could shoot someone in the middle of fifth avenue and not lose a single vote, he was right and bizarrely so. he can do anything and say anything no matter how outrageous or ridiculous and his supporters will lap it up unquestioningly. why? hell if i know.

  10. DudePlayingDudeDisguisedAsAnotherDude

    Perhaps, it's not a bad idea to look at unemployment from the perspective of workforce participation. Obviously, you have to cut off some population on the left and the right hand side. Let's not pretend that numbers such as 4.7% or 7.9% are any more meaningful than 53% labor force participation. We are just looking for a trend.

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