Well, they mostly survey employers for payroll data. Employers don't talk about people they are paying illegally.

My observation is that Democrats feel too much.

What the party in charge and the media talk about are the U-3 numbers. I understand why the party in power does, it's the lower number, but I'm not sure why the media doesn't focus more on U-6. This is an article about U-6. Business and economics publications (this is from CNBC) talk about U-6, the rest of the media usually doesn't and I don't know why that is.

No, I definitely remember criticizing him for the rising U-6 numbers.

It was obvious then why it was happening, not so clear now though. But still bad. I can't say it isn't fair to criticize Trump for the same, but it's important to know why it's happening and at this point I'm not sure we do.

It's very unlikely to be the case, but the one condition I can think of where a rising U-6 would be a positive sign would be people leaving the workforce to have more children.

Or maybe America is just down in the dumps about hitting 250. I say this because the summary says it is the lowest since America turned 200.

I turn 50 next year. Not super excited about that milestone.

(Yes, I am being facetious)

You mean the U-6 unemployment figures? The ones published along with the more commonly reported U-3 numbers, and is the subject of this article?

U-6 has always been the better figure to look at, and I don't know why it isn't the one the press cares about. Blame them, not the people who publish the numbers you say are hidden.

There's a good chance that reopening the mental institutions would still lead to them being underfunded, overcrowded, and horrible. But not necessarily. And we may have to do it anyway.

Where does the UBI money come from? Even if it was only $10,000/year, that would be... $3.2 trillion a year.

That cost would cripple taxpayers and squeeze businesses to the point where they can't afford to hire, kicking off a downward spiral with a positive feedback loop. That's what happened in the Great Depression, and it took a world war to break it.

We need pro-growth policies so that small businesses can grow and hire. That cycle spirals upward.

And here's an idea for one - no business taxes if you pay your employees (including contractors to close that loophole) more than some threshold value. Pegged to some function of the poverty level, or maybe a highest to lowest salary ratio for large enterprises. You can do that safely because corporate income taxes just get passed on to consumers anyhow, and you'll be capturing higher individual income tax revenue. Higher wages lead to higher demand, higher demand leads to expanded supply, which leads to more jobs...

Wow. What the f-k is wrong with you?

Toaster licenses?

I found it telling when a certain prominent black Democrat said we need illegal aliens to pick our crops. People used to say the same thing about a different kind of cheap labor.

It's very easy, but it's also very bad. You can give people government busywork, but that squeezes private enterprise out of the labor market, especially small businesses. The engine powering our economy is private enterprise, primarily small businesses. If everything has crashed, they can get it going again because labor becomes cheap. If labor doesn't become cheap, they fail and that cascades throughout the rest of the economy. This is what happened during the Great Depression. FDR's attempts to get out of it, made it worse.

Government doesn't produce things. It can build infrastructure, but that's useless if there's no private enterprise to put it to productive use. You need private enterprise to provide the jobs.

If the dead can't find jobs, how are they supposed to afford healthcare? Do you just want them to stay dead? Monstrous!

A training program is always going to be more useful than busywork, and that's what the New Deal boondoggles were. And I use the term "boondoggle" because it gained the meaning of "government scam" because FDR was paying people to sit around and make boondoggles (the little slide that holds a Boy Scout's neckerchief together).

It actually prolonged the Depression by screwing up the labor market and making it impossible for small struggling businesses to find workers.