Trump puts true US unemployment rate at 20 percent
Presumptive US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has challenged President Barack Obama’s claim regarding the country’s unemployment rate of five percent.
"We have tremendous deficits. Don't believe the 5 percent. The real [unemployment] number is 20 percent," Trump said during a speech at a rally in San Diego, California, on Friday.
“The United States is dying from within, its domestic infrastructure is crumbling and successive administrations have wasted $5 trillion in the Middle East instead of using the money to create jobs and prosperity at home,” he added.
The New York businessman noted that while the US domestic economy was in deep crisis, hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on defending some prosperous nations whose export figures to the US were far more than those imported from it.
“You look at the NATO countries, many of them aren't living up to their obligations. They're our friends, they're our allies, but they've been abusing us… Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, we defend these countries and they don't pay us," Trump said.
This is while former US Treasury official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (pictured above) in a report published in January, said the unemployment rate of 5% only counts non-discouraged workers who are still expecting to find a job.
“The actual unemployment rate, that is, the rate that includes Americans who have given up hope of finding employment, is 23%. Currently, there are 94,691,000 Americans of working age who are not in the labor force,” he noted.
According to a poll released earlier this month, the majority of Americans are strikingly pessimistic about the US economy and think the economy won’t improve.
Only 42 percent of adults describe the US economy as good and just 23 percent think the economy will improve this year, according to a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Just a third say they'd be very confident of finding another job if they were laid-off -- a sign of vulnerability even though the Great Recession officially ended nearly seven years ago.
The US has endured a sluggish economic recovery from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Nothing has ignited the robust economic growth that Americans remember enjoying until the Great Recession struck in late 2007.
Some view the slow growth as a sign that the economy has never escaped the threat of another recession.
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