Part time jobs and full time jobs are not distinguished in the number that you hear touted on the news. U6 is a better number for understanding that.

As the Beatles once said, "Nothing is real. Nothing to write home about" - from Strawberry Fields Forever.

Nothing can be believed that comes out of the Bureau of Lies and Statistics (officially the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

I have worked as a corporate manager for most of my career. The larger the corporation the easier it is to make the numbers say whatever you need them to say. I would suspect the government is the same.

Unless the person generating and manipulating the numbers is a person of principles first, results seconds and everything else is just well less important you can bet the numbers you see tell half truths.

In this case there are several things that are lies. A=A but a job does not equal a job. I spent a 18 months under employed. I would have never shown up on these statistics because I did not take unemployment. I did things like pick cherries, deliver newspapers, take a call center job.... until I found a job back in Business Management. Much of what i did in that 18 months was seasonal, some if it paid in cash. I was never "unemployed" by these numbers, but I was unemployed in the field that I was skilled for and the work that I enjoyed doing.

Perhaps more importantly I was unemployed in the way I felt about myself. This is where the most serious damage of unemployment can come from. How do you catch that with numbers?

Do you believe anything that comes out of our government? I personally do not. I would say with certainty that there is numbers games being played.

I was an elected county supervisor in a small rural county in Wisconsin for 4 years and learned first hand that you cannot trust numbers or anything else to be accurate even at the local level. We know it get worse at the state & federal levels.

The unemployment numbers excludes those people who have given up looking

The real unemployment number is closer to 10%.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_dat...

The U6 unemployment rate counts not only people without work seeking full-time employment (the more familiar U-3 rate), but also counts "marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons." Note that some of these part-time workers counted as employed by U-3 could be working as little as an hour a week. And the "marginally attached workers" include those who have gotten discouraged and stopped looking, but still want to work. The age considered for this calculation is 16 years and over