Originally Posted by Rochard

I completely disagree with this. At the low point of the recession, everyone I knew locally was out of work and loosing their jobs and loosing their houses. I no longer see any of this - all of my local friends have jobs.

You can argue about the true number of unemployed people until you are blue in the face. You can argue there are people who fell off of unemployment because they were on it too long, but you can also argue that some people who are on unemployment are on unemployment because it's free money. (My brother was on unemployment, and he told he wasn't interested in looking for a job. Why work a crappy job when he can get a paycheck for doing nothing is what he told me. The moment his unemployment ran out he went and got a job.)

The unemployment rate has been determined the same exact way since I was a youngster - why are we suddenly questioning it now? If you want to change the way we come to this number then that's fine - but we'll need to adjust it for every year. And then we compare. And I'm guessing we'll end up with the same exact result - higher numbers, but unemployment coming down.