One of the many victims of politicizing by the George Dubya Administration was how the Employment Rate of the US is calculated and reported. The old U3 (Official Unemployment Rate) has been manipulated to show only the number of people who are currently receiving a weekly unemployment check and those who recently applied for Unemployment Benefits. It does not include those who have stopped receiving Unemployment Benefits even though they are still looking for work, those who have given up hope of finding work, those who have taken part-time jobs to survive, those who are under-employed and those who have taken temporary work to survive. The new rate reported today by the government of 6.5% (U3) is not comparable to the unemployment rates that have been reported in prior Recessions

To get comparable unemployment information one must go and look at the U6 Unemployment Report of the government. That is now at an Unemployment Rate of 11.3%. Now that is a really serious but accurate report of what is really going on in the US economy in terms of real unemployment.

U6 is the broadest measure of Unemployment: It includes those people counted by U3, plus marginally attached workers (not looking, but want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past), as well as Persons employed part time for economic reasons (they want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule).

When former Senator Phil Graham (Republican - Texas) recently pontificated that the unemployment rate was nothing more than a mental figment in the minds of the American public when the official rate was at 6.1% he was actually lying and knew he was lying because he holds a PhD in Economics and knows the difference between the U3 and the U6 reports and that the U6 report is the one that credentialed economists study and from which they draw their conclusions. Phil Graham is demonstrably a better politician than he is an honest economist.

Fred