How do we know peopel have dropped off unemloyment rolls are not working?

[booley]

I mean, the logic makes sense. If you have a bunch of people who were getting unemployment but aren't now and they they aren't working, they have to be somewhere, right?

But has there been any studies or other research or data on people who ran out of unemployment but didn't find work?

Do we know how many there are? Do we know who these people are and hwo they are surviving now?

Any sources would be helpful...

[pelagius]

1. Hard numbers might be tough...

...to come by. Some younger (and even not so young) people have moved back to their parents' house. Some people have raided their retirement accounts and/or live off home equity loans. Some are technically "back at work", but making much less than they used to.

And, of course, some are busy building the robust recovery by selling all they own on eBay!

[Demeter]

2. I'd Say the Economic Numbers Speak for Themselves

If people were working, they'd be making money. Tax revenues would be up, sales would be up, and businesses wouldn't be closing, rents wouldn't be dropping, and commercial buildings wouldn't stand vacant. Soup kitchens wouldn't be begging for money, hospitals would be expanding, not shrinking, in other words, it would look like Clinton country.

[Demeter]

3. Dupe

[bread_and_roses]

4. Not exactly analogous but

a while back someone tried to conduct a study tracking the people who had gone off welfare in NYC after welfare "reform". They couldn't find a significant number of them...they had just disappeared. Maybe they suddenly became prosperous and moved to the suburbs, or maybe into the deepest poverty, where you don't have a phone, you keep changing apartments as the rent gets behind, you farm the kids to relatives and live out of your car or on the street...no one knew which.

[Lorien]

5. I know four personally

never knew any when Clinton was in office!

[pelagius]

6. I used to work in high tech...

...and a significant number of my co-workers were laid off between 2000 and 2002. These were not "dot-com kids"; they were senior people with 15-20 years in the industry. The ones I keep in touch which have returned to some form of work, but mostly a greatly diminished (25-50% less) wages. Others are self-employed (i.e., working whatever contract job they can scare up) with no benefits.

I've kept working, but at 35% less income. I've always lived...uh...conservatively in regard to debt and such, so my family is fine. But we have no extra money. We pay our basic bills -- medical insurance is $780/mo for a family of four -- and have very little left over. There's food on the table, a roof over our head, and protection for when we get sick or injured. I'm not complaining.

However, we're not putting anything into the economy in terms of discretionary consumer purchases or even long-term savings.

We consider ourselves quite lucky. One of our neighbors just had to turn their house over to the bank because they had re-fi'd away most of their equity to support their customary lifestyle -- not too lavish, but typical upper-middle class consumerism -- on a greatly diminished income.

[Syncronaut Seven]

7. Ummm... that would be me.

Gross earnings 1996-2000: $96,000

Gross earnings 2000-2004: $6,300

Trips to food bank 2004: 6

Right now I'm about as evil as an Eskimo boy can be.

EDIT: Oh yea, lost my house/garden/rabbits in 2002. Pittance of an equity check is gone now.

Who would I most like to have a beer with now? Hehehe...

[ThomWV]

8. My Wife Is One - - - And nobody ever asked what happed to her

[H2O Man]

9. You raise an interesting question.

Actually, a set of questions. The labor statistics are often manipulated. Here's an example: suppose a person (#1) works at a convenience store; there is a shift at the end of the summer when a person (#2) at another job goes back to school. The firsat person is one of three people who switches jobs, from store A to B to C to factory D to take #2's job. No job has been created, and no more people are employed. There's merely been a shift. But the administration counts that as four new jobs. Look closely at the workers in your convenience stores, because they account for the miracle of the Bush job recovery.

Second, the number of new jobs does not equal the number of lost jobs minus the number of unemployed. Yet because the administration manipulates the number of "new jobs," (including the number of factory workers who are underemployed at service jobs) we do not know the true number of "off the records/out of work."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. I know three who are long-term unemployed

One is surviving on a series of temporary jobs and subsidies from relatives.

The other two took early Social Security after two years of fruitless job hunting and are supplementing it with part-time jobs.

When my college teaching career ended, I became a free-lance translator.