A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims.

Should the government measure unemployment with Hunter's figure, the unemployment rate would be higher than the current rate of approximately 8 percent -- a potentially devastating assessment for the White House, especially in an election year.

The San Diego-based lawmaker contends that he did not introduce his bill to make the president look bad, since the number would reflect poorly on all individuals in charge of government.

In a recent interview, Hunter said, “it makes me look bad too when unemployment is sliding...it makes the Republican Congress, the president and the Democrat Senate -- anybody who is an elected representative and in charge look bad. I don’t think it goes one way.”

His one-page legislation, the “REAL Unemployment Calculation Act” would require “the federal government [to] cite, as its official unemployment calculation, the figure that takes into account those who are no longer looking for work,” not only those individuals actively seeking jobs.

For example, the most recent unemployment rate released on Friday with 8.2 percent unemployment, would be officially considered 9.6 percent, the so-called U5 rate that was also released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.)

The measure would not require any additional numbers to be calculated, it would simply use a statistic that the BLS already calculates each month, alongside the so-called official unemployment rate and a handful of other stats.

The U5 stat measures, “total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force,” while the U3 stat or the “official unemployment rate,” measures, “total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”

Though the government modernized how unemployment was surveyed in 1994 -- adding the several different calculations, including the U5 rate to the mix -- the official unemployment calculation has remained largely the same, according to a report on the “alternative unemployment measures” released by the BLS in 1994...

For the past two decades, there has been a consistent spread between the U3 and U5 rates, until several years ago during President Obama’s administration, when the U3 began to improve while the U5 rose, according to a recent study of Labor Department data released by Investor’s Business Daily in late February.

Therefore, Hunter believes that it is imperative to deem that U5 rate as the “official unemployment rate,” as he says, the U3 avoids “a subset of Americans who are not counted.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics does in fact provide alternative measurements of unemployment, but they are consistently overshadowed by the U3 rate, which ignores a large group of people. We need to be realistic and focus our attention on the figure that provides the most accurate representation of national unemployment -- not the figure that under-represents the challenge we face,” Hunter said in a recent statement.

Still, the U5 rate does not factor the reasons that individuals stopped looking for work, such as, deciding to go to school, inheriting money, or realizing that jobs were not available in their local area. It also does not account for the number of individuals who are on unemployment insurance, according to a source familiar with the monthly survey.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics refrained from commenting on Hunter’s legislation.

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Editor's Note: And then there are two more statistics that are even more accurate, the U6 rate (which includes discouraged workers, discouraged less than one year) and the all inclusive SGS rate (including an estimate of the long-term discouraged workers -- those discouraged for more than one year -- who no longer are included in the BLS calculations). The current U6 unemployment rate is 14.5%. The current SGS all-inclusive unemployment rate is 22.2%.


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