23 million Americans unemployed?!....Saw this number thrown around on Facebook.

[JH19059]

Now I didn't major in math in college but I did take high school calculus and college calculus. Last time I checked there are roughly 313 million Americans. Now if you take that number and multiply by the current unemployment rate of 7.8 percent you get a rough number of around 24 million which is close to this 23 million number that's being thrown around. Slight problem with this... children/retirees/disabled/stay at home parents/wealthy etc..are also included in this number. Wouldn't the true number be around half of that number around, 12 million roughly, due to the fact the the current eligible workforce is around 154 million. Maybe I'm wrong please correct me if I am. Are they including the under employed? If so that's some strange fucked up math!

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. Romney's whole argument is myth...

along with the 23 million, he also said "Romney noted that if out-of-work Americans who no longer look for jobs were counted, the unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent," a comment that is pure urban myth.

Unemployment is actually figured from a household survey, as noted in this NPR.org blog and from household survey data.

The household survey data comes from Census Bureau workers going to people's homes and asking them if they are working, if they are looking for work, etc. The establishment survey comes from the BLS contacting businesses and government agencies and asking them about the total number of employees they have, how many hours they've worked, etc. The BLS can't talk to every single person or every single business so they talk to about 140,000 businesses and government agencies and 60,000 households, and they use that data to calculate the job situation for the entire economy.

The "Employment Situation Summary" is a .gov site that explains the whole thing.