"There's No Doubt About the Need"

The unemployment rate is 13.3 percent https://t.co/14z6rrTpAs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2020

Yes, it is:

“13.3% unemployment is an economic and human disaster. Peak unemployment in the Great Recession was 10%,” tweeted Michael Strain, head director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “Workers, families, and small businesses need Phase 4 [stimulus]. There’s no doubt about the need.”

And returning to Yamiche's point, which was to look more carefully at the numbers:

Economists, however, pointed out that even the latest data shows 28 million people had their job cut or hours reduced during the pandemic. Plus, an alarming number — 2.3 million people — now say they have permanently lost their jobs. There’s a long way to go before the job market gets back to where it was before the pandemic.

The economic picture is further complicated by the fact that a lot of people stopped looking for work in May or had their hours reduced. These people’s jobs were probably affected by the pandemic, too, but they aren’t counted as part of the official unemployment rate. There were more than 6 million people who said they wanted full-time work but were instead working part time in May. And another 6 million who were out of a job but stopped looking actively, probably because of the health emergency. To be counted as unemployed, people needed to be sending out résumés in the past month.

Another quirk is people who told the agency that they were temporarily laid off because of the pandemic. The BLS classified many of these people “employed but absent from work due to other reasons.” Normally, this is a very small category, but several million people were classified this way. The BLS even put a special note to say the unemployment rate would be 16.3 percent, not 13.3 percent, if all these people classified as absent from work because of “other reasons” had been classified unemployed. 

So what's the "right" number?

Here, have a picture.  Donny likes pictures, too, I'm told.

Looks a lot more like a red rubber ball than a sunrise, if you ask me.