Sign "O" the Times

Gallup has long performed its own unemployment survey, and it would be generous to say that it hasn’t quite jibed with the official figures from the Obama Administration’s BLS. But I can’t recall ever seeing anything like the editorial written this week by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton, who calls the official 5.6% unemployment rate “a big lie.”

Read:

If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.

There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find — in other words, you are severely underemployed — the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

None of this is news to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™. But it’s unprecedented in my memory for the non-partisan and highly trusted Gallup organization to directly take on the White House in this manner.

Bravo, Jim Clifton. Bravo, Gallup.

Please share the heck out of this and give it the exposure it deserves.