I just finished reading a very interesting article in regards to the Great Depression and the unemployment rate calculations compared to today’s calculations. I am somewhat of a number cruncher so I am going to try to break this down a bit. A very interesting thought is that in 2004 when unemployment was at 5.5% we had a little over 16 million unemployed in this country. Now assuming that our current unemployment rate has no obvious correlation to the number of employable people in this country, you have to assume that our rate of unemployed, employable people is much closer to 13% +/-.

If 533,000 jobs only represents .2% of the unemployment rate the government would assume that only 17.8 million +/- people are unemployed. With the facts above my guess is we are somewhere around 20+ million Americans currently unemployed. That would lead me to believe that we are roughly at 13% unemployment based on 160 million employable Americans. Based on the governments calculations we would have to have another 21 million unemployed in order to reach a rate of 15%. That would give us over 40 million unemployed in the US (if we hit that number and I pray we don’t), it would be roughly 25% of the entire employable population.

I am basing these number off of a census report in 2,000 that said there are roughly 174 million people between the ages of 18-64. Of that I took about 8% off for the disabled or unable to qualify for work. I do know that America’s population has grown since the census of 2000 so my rough numbers could be off by 8-10% as far as the population of employable 18-64 year olds. I could be way off on all these numbers, but it just doesn’t seem to add up to me.

So what are the real numbers? Are we much closer to that 15% unemployment rate that many of Piggs believe can happen? The government is predicting an unemployment rate of 8.5% when we reach the bottom of this collapse. I think that is a very optimistic number and with their calculation we would have roughly another 5.3 million unemployed, which seems extremely inevitable within the next 6 months. I am just confused so if there are any smart people that understand the unemployment numbers please feel free to break it down for me and the other Piggs.

Again these are all rough numbers and extremely open to interpretation.