Only 47% of working age Americans have full time jobs

01-24-2011 • TheAutomaticEarth.blogspot.com

If you count the "Part time employed for non-economic reasons", you get 126.8 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, working part time or "Not in the labor force". That represents 53% of working age Americans. So only 47% of working age Americans have full time jobs. While the official unemployment rate is 9.4%. Something's missing somewhere. A few more factoids on the topic: Today, the long term unemployed make up 42% of total unemployed. That is to say, of course, those who are actually counted as unemployed instead of "Not in the labor force". 43.2 million Americans receive foodstamps. That's 18.1% of all working age Americans. If they all have on average 1.5 dependents, which is probably a reasonable estimate, a full one third of the US population receives at least part of their food through this system. Of course, these are not really stamps anymore, or any sort of paper, they’re now "food stamp debit cards". Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse dug up an ABC News article from April 2009, which deals with the fact that JPMorgan Chase is one of the main servicers of the "food stamp debit cards" (in 26 states). JPMorgan also services child support debit cards (in 15 states) and unemployment insurance cards (7 states).