Unemployment Rate Actually 17.5%

The official unemployment rate stands at 10.2%.  Pretty terrible, but it's even worse than that.  The actual unemployment rate includes not only people looking for work, but people working part time jobs that want to work full time and workers otherwise underemployed.

The New York Times explains:

With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.

In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.

This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Read it all here.