I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable.
So it is an age group, with caveats.
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.
When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.
By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.