The official U.S. tally of unemployed workers may be showing millions too many people jobless, due to problems with the Pandemic Unemployed Assistance (PUA) program, which gives aid to gig workers, the self-employed, and others not covered by conventional unemployment insurance.
The problem seems to vary by state. Texas’s count of people receiving the program’s help closely match the federal number; but Montana shows 9,000 enrolled in PUA, while the federal government’s count is more than 60,000. Federal figures show seven million Californians in the program, while the state can find only about two million.
Various counts suggest rather than more than 10 million aid recipients, the PUA might actually be helping five to seven million people.
Each state counts unemployed people in its own way and reports the figures weekly to the U.S. labor department, which then compiles a national report. The “continuing claims” category supposedly numbers people who are collecting benefits from week to week, but the figure represents applications filed; not all are approved.
Also, when the system is backlogged by a tide of applications, people may file retroactively for several weeks at once, distorting the count.
At the same time, undocumented workers, people who work for cash in the black market, and similar shadow populations who are out of work are not counted among the officially unemployed. Also, there are people out of work who are unable to file for benefits or whose claims were denied.
“It’s both an overcount and an undercount at the same time,” Eliza Forsythe, an unemployment economist at the University of Illinois, told the Wall Street Journal.
The flawed count makes it difficult to gauge the true state of the job market and can skew estimates of how quickly the economy is recovering, economists say.
TRENDPOST: For decades, the U.S. unemployment numbers have been inaccurate. Indeed, once unemployment benefits run out and people are still without jobs, the United Soviet States of America no longer counts them as unemployed.
For accuracy in U.S. job numbers and government statistics, we go to http://www.shadowstats.com.
