Naive Question: Job Growth in America

[xoxoxoBruce]

Years ago I was surprised to read the headcount of unemployed is only people on the unemployment rolls. Once your benefits run out you drop out of sight and join the ranks of homeless, ghosts to the government. I wonder if that has changed?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Years ago I was surprised to read the headcount of unemployed is only people on the unemployment rolls. Once your benefits run out you drop out of sight and join the ranks of homeless, ghosts to the government. I wonder if that has changed?

It's one of the U-measures of employment/unemployment; there are others in that same system. I gather it doesn't take too much skull sweat to assess one measurement of unemployment numbers against another, and arrive at a satisfactory estimate. I seem to recall officially-cited unemployment stats were changed to this measure in Obama's second term.

Another of the U-measures adds the unemployed-benefits people together with the ones that for one reason or another have dropped out of even looking for work, for an aggregate total of non-employed right now.

For the last year in the Oxnard area there seems to be a Help Wanted Now Hiring sign in every shop window. This is in California, mind -- not a wildly business friendly place if it's not Silicon Valley or Hollywood -- to a lesser extent, oil. Four years ago it wasn't that way. Sacramento is the one-party abode of dumbshits.