by Patrick Appel
Romney, downplaying recent economic good news, is now saying that "the real unemployment rate is over 15 percent." Ezra Klein explains what Romney is talking about:
Romney is referring here to the so-called “U6” measure. It is not, strictly speaking, a measure of unemployment. It’s a measure that groups the unemployed, the involuntarily part-time and the no-longer-looking together into one index. It’s the broadest measure of labor-market misery we have. And it also means that, technically, Romney is wrong: You have to take into account part-time workers who would like to be full-time before you get above 15 percent. But he’s right to say that there’s more economic pain than the basic unemployment rate shows.
Rich Yeselson notes that the U6 number, while still very high, has gone down:
[A]s you can see in this chart, the u6 almost always perfectly tracks the conventional (u3) unemployment measure. It’s dropped from a high of 17.4%, at the height of the recession in 2009, and, like the u3, it also declined this month from last month’s 15.2%. So, as you would expect during a slow, sluggish, but continued recovery, it just keeps going down, just like the typical unemployment rate.
Adam Sorensen expects Romney to keep talking about the economy no matter what.
(Interactive jobs chart from Obama's website)
The Dish 