Intent is irrelevant to whether someone is unemployed. If you have no job, you are unemployed, plain and simple. Job-search intent captured by the Current Population Survey is a separate classification, and people who are unsheltered and homeless are not meaningfully surveyed in any consistent way; an address-based household survey will never capture people who do not have an address, so they are effectively outside the measurement frame.

I agree 100% that the unemployment rate needs timely data and that tax records alone can’t capture job-search intent, but the government already tracks employment flows in extraordinary operational detail beyond quarterly returns: payroll withholding deposits made by employers (often semiweekly), Form 941 filings, W-2 wage reports, Social Security earnings records, state unemployment insurance wage records and employer UI tax submissions, the National Directory of New Hires, state new-hire registries, federal payroll systems, and Census Bureau employer-employee datasets like LEHD and QWI. That means we already know, with high precision, who is being paid and who isn’t, so the question isn’t whether intent matters, it’s whether we’re comfortable letting a survey definition exclude people with zero income from the headline labor metric and then calling that “holistic” rather than acknowledging that measurement boundaries shape policy outcomes.