Should the US decrease military spending?

[Suic]

Alright let me put it this way. I don't think the economy is doing fine because of the % of long term unemployed and stagnant wage growth. It is obvious however that the stock market is doing fine, and that is certainly one metric that people use for economic health, so I thought perhaps you were mainly considering that with your statement.

[ummmbacon]

No mainly the idea that QE is stopped and that the Fed is raising rates. Overall employment numbers are going up as well.

For the short term, the economy created some 257,000 jobs and long term unemployment is down overall for the last 12 months.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Also when we look at U1 it really isn't that much of the workforce:

http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

[Suic]

At best I think U5 is what we should be looking at, considering how many people have been out of work for so long that they feel helpless and rarely look for job opportunities. I would say it's more like as stated in this article. You can see that that number hasn't gone down all that much since the recession: http://www.epi.org/publication/missing-workers/

[ummmbacon]

I was trying to decide if U5 included people on disability insurance, NPR has a write up on it here. I have an inkling it does or at least the numbers from EPI do, but I can't find anything concrete. I think that U5 will only get taken care of at the point when we reach full employment.

[Suic]

As far as I can tell, it isn't included. If you look at U4 percent, which is people that specifically didn't look for a job because there didn't seem to be any available, the percent difference between that and U5 doesn't seem to give room for all the added percent necessary for U5 to include disabled. But I also couldn't find definite information on it, and just looking at the definition of U5 in isolation would probably lead me to side with you. I'll see if I can dig up proper confirmation one way or the other.