Unemployment: What is it?

[notebuyer]

As it turns out, it depends a lot on who you want to count. The key numbers are in table A-12 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics release.

Let's spend a moment with those definitions, using the rationales of the people who created them:

U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the

Comments

[affablestranger]

Wow.

[notebuyer]

I dunno. I'd sort of prefer, "Oh, no!" to that last number.

[affablestranger]

How about "Oh noes!"?

Funny. All I keep reading in the newspaper and seeing on tv is how the economy is now in recovery and things are improving "across the board", how Teh Bamster's and Con-gress' hard work has "turned things around".

[notebuyer]

If this is "turned around", then I'm not sure what direction he was planning on going.