Real US Unemployment rate at 9.3%. Obama Administration claims it is 5.7%.
There are no fewer than 6 measures of unemployment, but Obama's administration is quite properly quoting the same one (U3) that's been used as the default/standard for a great many decades. There's a decent argument that U6 (the one that's at 9.3%) should replace it, but claiming that a quote today of 5.7% is "wrong" or "not real", or that it hints at malfeasance, is an error. Yet I keep seeing that meme turn up in parts of the media. It's kind of annoying, because there are plenty of better metrics to criticize.
Indeed, this political obsession over jobs is mostly just political spectacle at this point. The US economy is now pretty close to "full employment", in the economic sense. See
this chart of the U6 unemployment rate over the last 22 years -- it's pretty much returned to normal. See also
here, where we can see one measure of wage growth showing an uptick after a long post-GFC flat, suggesting a tightening of the labor market. There's lots of things to fix, if the incoming administration is up to it, but unemployment's not one of them. (Though, granted, avoiding a backslide remains important, and improved policy conceivably could encourage unemployment to move /below/ its 20-year trend.)
(Note that the first graph also implicitly hints at one of the reasons that we're not yet using U6 as the default "unemployment rate" -- it wasn't measured prior to 1994, so we can't track or analyze it further back than that, reducing its usefulness as we can't compare it against previous large recessions.)
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