The Question About How Many People Are Employed In America Is Tough To Answer

By Larry Hall


Because of the economy in the United States, there are not as many people actually working as there were in, say, 2007. In government circles and the numbers they give out, they try not to talk about workforce labor rates. These, right now, are lower than they have been since the 1970s. So when trying to actually pin down how many people are employed in America, the numbers, because of the politicians who have to explain them, are hidden behind a lot of words that do not really mean anything.

Approximately 320,000,000 people populate the United States. In 2007, the number of jobs available is about 143,000,000. That number has not stayed static and is currently much smaller. Some of the reasons are an aging of some segments of society and others have to do with businesses going out of business due to harsh regulations by federal officials.

This is the year 2017 and the powers that be are reporting the unemployment rate is about five percent. You will notice that this number is so fungible that whoever is reporting it reports the number they need in order to get more votes. Some people get the idea that, because of this, that number is not altogether accurate and fact based but just a political answer that means little.

When you discover, as you should, that the administration that reports these numbers are the ones who do the math to find them. Different White House personnel will use different criteria when coming up with them. People, such as yourself, wonders whether each administration uses the same things when they figure out the numbers. It often feels as if there is a big disconnect here.

A good number of about 138,000,000 jobs being available takes into consideration about 95,000,000 people out of work. This is the number of people who have been fired, laid off or quit and are not even trying to find work. They have been told that many of the jobs that are no longer there will not be coming back. This information is coming from an administration that is often waging a war against companies through regulations and taxes.

At the current unemployment rate setting at five percent, that should mean, out of a total of 320,000,000 persons, 160,000,000 should be working. However, when correcting for those taking unemployment payments and those unable to work because of medical conditions and balancing that with the labor workforce rate, we come up short of that. This where the answer to our question gets rather fuzzy.

There is also another number that is added to any others they come up with. These are called bias jobs and they assign a number to people who just must be working because of something they are doing. They, the politicians, who have nothing else to claim as good, say that what they are doing, again, to simply gain votes, say that there are many people that owe their jobs to them.

All of the numbers that go round and round, in Washington DC, come out and are reported as being anything but accurate numbers. They say everyone does it, so they should to. What this does is it makes the answer to the question about how many people are actually working very unclear, to say the least.




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