Why do unemployment statistics only count people who want to work and not the actual number of unemployed people?

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I understand the need to exclude the young, old, disabled, and homemakers but why do unemployment statistics not include those who are simply living off of welfare and not intending to work (or on the opposite end of the spectrum, those living off of a trust fund)? Is this subset of the population just not big enough to be worth including in the statistics?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Two big reasons: it’s actually tricky to accurately quantify the number of unemployed people that could technically work if they wanted to and it’s politically disadvantageous to be truthful about this number.

Same with inflation. It’s tough to really quantify and the government has no incentive to be honest about it anyway, so you get convoluted calculations that exclude a ton of important variables until they can massage the number down to something they like.

The unemployment rate in the US is WAY higher than the 2.1% or so they’re claiming. Inflation is also WAY higher than the 9.1% they’re claiming.

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