Investors.com
Real Jobs Numbers Are Far Worse Than Official Numbers Suggest

Labor Market: For many economy-watchers and investors, the nonrelease of jobs data due to the government shutdown is a big problem. How can they know how the economy is doing? Don't worry, we've got you covered.

Investor's Business Daily has been polling Americans each month on the job market for well over a decade. Unlike the numbers released each month by the Labor Department, ours haven't been crunched, tweaked, twisted, seasonally adjusted or otherwise tortured to tell a comforting story.

In October, our jobs data continued to tell a consistent story about the economy under President Obama's disastrous policies. And it isn't pretty.

The government's official unemployment report in September showed 11.3 million people, or about 7.3% of the labor force, without jobs. Not good, but not disastrous, right?

Well, those data exclude a lot of people — particularly the millions of discouraged workers who have simply given up looking for a job. So the real unemployment number is bigger — a lot bigger.

In our IBD/TIPP Poll, we ask a different question: "How many members of your household are currently unemployed and are looking for employment?"

Not surprisingly, the answer we get differs greatly from the government's data. This month's survey, completed Thursday night, indicated that 47.9 million Americans are looking for work. No, that's not a misprint: 47.9 million.

Out of a workforce of 154 million, that yields a gross unemployment rate of 31%. Among all households, 26% have at least one member looking for work.

We also find data on "Job-Sensitive Households" — those with one or more people looking for work plus those saying they're "concerned" about a member of the household losing a job. That number is 31%, up from 23% as recently as April.

Our country's labor markets, in short, are in far worse shape than you've been led to believe.

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