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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

    What I think is scarier though is thinking about 
    what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% 
    and starts moving towards 30%.

That is already the case in some countries (even some western ones, like Spain: 26.1% as of December 2012).

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There's another official rate rate you can check out. The "real" unemployment rate, which measures everybody considered unemployed plus a lot of others who are falling through the cracks. It's called the U-6 unemployment. The government publishes this data in the same monthly report as all the other official employment numbers, and anybody can find it on the Internet. In the US the U-6 unemployment is [b]16.2%[/b] and counting. You could also just count the "Americans-on-Food-Stamps"number. It's 46 Million.

The national monthly [1] and state annual average [2] "alternative measures of labor underutilisation" stats are easy to find, but do you know where to get monthly or quarterly data by state, or better, by county?

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

[2]: http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

Well the footstamps number isn't showing unemployed though. It will also show people who are employed by extremely shitty companies like Walmart.

People still do have work, though. They just work "black" and eventually receive unemployment benefits at the same time. The official numbers just don't reflect reality. That said, the economic situation in Spain is not great at the moment, but still not as bad as reported by the media sometimes.

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