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Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.

We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.

There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.

So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.

—

The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.

You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.

>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.

Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Also net population loss of working age adults via deportation and self deportation.

The Fed just had an article on the labor force participation rate drops: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/aug/what-is-b...

> The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break

Are most teachers considered and counted as unemployed during summner break? All the teachers I know are paid 12 months a year. 10-month appointments are seen in colleges and universities but even there professors often have grants that pay for their research in the summer and even if not I don't think I'd consider them "unemployed" in the summer.

I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.

They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.

>As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.

> ...

>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.

The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...

>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.

You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?

> You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?

Sorry, is OP the POTUS, speaking with Presidential authority and threatening federal employees with termination of employment for their political beliefs? The fact you think they're wrong is not a reason to equate their comment to Trump's actions.

At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.

> over the past year so many [federal employees] have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output

This is the most obvious point in favor of this perspective, especially as it being an escalation by the current president and his administration. It hardly even seems to be a cynical take. At least, the cynicism is being used appropriately, as a tool to guide one's thoughts rather than being the entire argument.

One can look at the DOGE cuts, tally up the numbers, and see for themself that the stated reason (desired reduction of spending that is orders of magnitude higher than what they've actually cut) can't be the actual reason for these cuts. Coupled with the... less than candid statements from this administration about anything and everything the past 17 months (hey, has anyone heard about these "Epstein files"?), the most logical conclusion is that they are deceptive whenever it suits them. And yes, even the nominally-objective numbers need to come attached with a reason to be trusted; we already know a litany of ways they can be manipulated (meaning they are indeed "nominally" objective, and have been for a long time); they can't be reasonably taken at face value.

So you are saying it's even worse than the numbers reported.

I would assume so, but these numbers are so cooked that who knows!

And this is even after Trump fired the previous Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for simply reporting poor jobs growth.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...

"And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything…"

And I suspect, sometime in the future, we're going to discover that the numbers were even worse than we thought they were—were covered up.

Job numbers have always been reviewed down after being released every single time since 2022.

Maybe, maybe not.

And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).

And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.

> thus paying more in taxes

If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?

> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.

Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

> We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?

Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.

> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).

I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.

But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.

global tariffs via ieepa or similar legislation - base flat tariffs against all imports from all countries - I think those will go. Biden kept some targeted tariffs, but didn't massive expand or do country-based tariffs.

I can see changes but I'm not sure about flat tariffs going away completely. One of the reasons for those is because what China will do to avoid American tariffs is to basically try and set up shop in a 3rd country, or just do some legal configuration to make the products they are dumping seem to come from the 3rd country instead. Kind of like a "final assembly" style loophole.

I agree Biden largely just kept the Trump regime in place, especially with respect to China, but I also think he was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and so something like broad tariffs given the economic and political environment probably weren't really considered.

Personally I feel like it's a win-win for me. Either we re-shore more manufacturing, stop China from dumping, &c. which result in higher prices but have other benefits that I value, or we don't and prices go down and wages and such go down which means cheaper goods and services which is also nice.

been a few days but... I'm not actually seeing a whole lot of 'reshore manufacturing'... at best, it's uneven, but price increases across the board (even before iran/oil shock) have been quite prevalent. Without this being formalized, we're left with monthly changes based on one lunatic's emotional state. There will be no big long term reshoring of efforts because the requirements will constantly change.

Yes, lunatic, nut, unstable, whatever. I went there (very edgy, I understand). The person inflicting all this chaos does not have the country's best interests at heart. To whatever extent his own power and money grabs have some positive spillover to the country... it's an unintentional by-product.

We're just left with 'higher prices' and 'continually increasing prices' as far as I can see, without concurrent higher wages and increasing jobs (or even flat jobs numbers). I'm seeing very little positive outcomes here for anyone except the already-elite rich folks.

Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs or the stupid Iran war. They wouldn't have passed anything like the BBB. Nor would they have tried to scare all the immigrants out of the country.

> Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs

They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.

The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO

Directional alignment but completely different policy. Trying to claim they are the same is nonsense.

Sure it can end up with a different policy which may or may not be as effective, but the goals are the same.

So trying to divorce the two parties here is also a bit of nonsense.

You don't think those two things have any effect on the economy?

Sure they have an effect but are they economic policies? If you want to take the approach that everything is an economic policy I guess we could do that, but I think it's a bit limiting.

I guess also, what's the goal of economic policy? Does your economy matter much if you can't defend it, for example? If you have no industrial base does that matter?

Under sequential administrations all the way up and until at least the end of Mr. Obama's second term we had, broadly speaking, the same economic policy and we lost a lot of jobs under that regime, lost manufacturing capabilities, and more. People were really unhappy with that scheme which was supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe we should examine our policies even if there are temporary changes that are unfavorable. Should we be long-term oriented or short-term oriented?

It's a very complicated topic of course, but I think just "grr mad at Trump" is not only immature but just wrong and leads to no meaningful analysis of what our economic policies have been, the results, and what changes may produce.

Immigration is clearly economic policy. It was partially justified on immigrants taking American's jobs.

The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.

> Immigration is clearly economic policy.

Sure but it's not strictly an economic policy. If you want to just talk about the economics of immigration I'd be happy to discuss that. I think there are pros and cons to many different approaches.

> The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.

Similarly Europe and the United States could have been economically smart and unsanctioned Russian gas and let them take over Ukraine. Sometimes economic policy is trumped by other considerations.