John Sarbanes: “I say to the very able Senator from California, who earlier showed a chart about how the rate of people participating in…”

“I say to the very able Senator from California, who earlier showed a chart about how the rate of people participating in the workforce has dropped, what has happened is you have 4.4 million workers today who are working part time for economic reasons. In other words, they want to work full time but they are only working part time. When you compute the unemployment rate, they are counted as employed, not as unemployed, but really they are only partially employed. Then you have another 4.6 million people who are discouraged and not currently looking for work who want to work. So they have been knocked out of the labor force as well. Actually, there are 13.3 million Americans unemployed, and if you use the broadest measure that the BLS prepares, they report an unemployment rate of 10.3 percent. That is factoring in everybody. That is your broadest measure and that is not usually the figure that is focused on. Ordinarily, when the unemployment rate figure comes down, those other figures shrink as well. But it is not all moving in the right direction.”