President Trump is considering a move that would increase the official unemployment rate by a full point, and it’s an idea that many liberals would be OK with.
That’s because it wouldn’t involve any workers losing their jobs. Rather, the new administration is considering switching the calculation the Labor Department uses as the official unemployment rate in place of a broader definition of what constitutes unemployment.
It’s not a bad idea, said Heidi Shierholz, until recently the Labor Department’s chief economist. Done properly, the change might give a better, more complex portrait of what is going on in the economy, she said. In any event, it wouldn’t do any harm. “It would not be that the unemployment rate has actually jumped. We’d just be using a different set of data to calculate it,” she said.
The Labor Department releases numbers on national unemployment every month, most recently stating that the official rate was 4.7 percent. Most news stories echoed that figure, but it was actually only one of six calculations the department releases each month, each using a slightly different definition of unemployed. The numbers are collectively known as U-1 through U-6.
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