4d ago

Ah shit folks. Some devious trickster hoodwinked the good Democrats into believing the economy was doing well when, in fact, it was doing shit.

Original URL where the cowards have changed the title now: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464

I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

Any fucking questions

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I remember reading about the "true unemployment rate" a while back, I always go there to check the rate instead of that 4% number. So ridiculous.
True unemployment rate
EDIT: Looks like it's from the author of that article! Anyways yeah it's a running counter
- Going by the graph at that link, the "true unemployment" has been as low as it's ever been for the past few years. I guess I don't understand the point of the article in the OP.
  
  24% vs 4% is by estimations about a 40m person difference. That seems like an incredibly important point to get across
  
  Yes, of course. I just don't understand the framing of Democrats being tricked. Is it supposed to be apologia for the Democrats running campaigns that got Trump elected twice?
  
  Democrat voters were uniformly tricked. Democrat politicians, who worked hard to elect Trump twice, were instrumental in doing the tricking. The point of the article is to explain the method by which the latter successfully tricked the former for decades.
  
  I don't think the decades-long trend is as important as:
  The real rate not meaningfully changing from 2020-2024,
  The rate still being high in absolute terms (1 in 4), and
  Democrats running as if the economy was not only doing well, but had improved significantly under Biden.
  I haven't flipped through the site a bunch, but I wonder if the higher historical rates are offset to a degree by lower costs of living in, say, 1995.

24 comments