Which underlines my point - poverty is not the same as unemployment. For starters, not all people live in three-persons households, especially ones that earn low wages (e.g. single young people just starting their professional careers). Secondly, defining every poor person as "unemployed" is making the term meaningless - just say "poor" then.
> Because your comment is full of generalizations and cynicism
I raised very specific issues with this methodology, and with the terminology specifically, but if all you can do is dismiss them as "cynicism" (do you even know what it means? it doesn't match any part of my objections) then fine, whatever.
I am objecting to the use of an established term to mean something this term is not supposed to mean. There's nothing "cynical" about it.
That when a politician brags about unemployment being so low to a voter, they're doing so to fool the voter, who likely associate unemployment rate as a measure of how well off everyone is doing, while in reality it doesn't, because if you look at the "true" unemployment, i.e., what that voter is thinking, which is how poor are Americans overall, well you'd actually see a pretty glooming picture with a large number of Americans living below poverty and the number growing year over year.
> if you look at the "true" unemployment, i.e., what that voter is thinking, which is how poor are Americans overall
Unemployment is not a measure how poor people are. While unemployment can lead to poverty, it's not the same as poverty. It's like saying "we'll add a number of sick people, obese people, people not working out, old people, people eating too much sugar, people not eating enough vegetables, people who smoke and people who drink alcohol - and call it 'true health index' and will demand to treat this number as if all these people were actually sick". Somehow you think it's more clear this way?
> well you'd actually see a pretty glooming picture with a large number of Americans living below poverty
There already are statistical measures of poverty. You don't need to call them "true unemployment". Call them "measures of poverty".
But why? Just an arbitrary number? What that number means? Defining "functionally unemployed" as "earning less than an arbitrary number we pulled out of our noses" is hugely misleading. Maybe that person can't earn more because they don't have skills, or have personal issues that prevent them from being more productive, or maybe earning high wage is not their priority right now (e.g. internship or apprenticeship). Unemployment has specific meaning - e.g. that by creating more employment opportunities you could fix it. Stuffing anybody that is not earning over $20K, for any reason whatsoever, under the term, just confuses the matters.
I get that it looks flashy - "the government is lying to you, the Real Truth is only available from us!" - but it's not useful to just change definitions of established terms because it sounds good in a soundbite. There are many other terms - like "labor participation", "underemployment", "economical hardship", "working poor", etc. - one could coin many more. Redefining existing one while slapping the misleading label "true" to it is not helping.