alt Hacker News> America is at near full employment
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
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I don’t think you can take any numbers coming from this administration seriously, regardless of the institution.
The U6 is also historically low though. America is as fully employed as just about anytime in the past 50 years. Using a different metric may have different raw numbers, but the conclusion is the same.
Same issue in my country with employment rates. Yes, some of those have been looking for work for so long that they slide from looking to "not looking" automatically. However at the same time, some of those people actually don't want to work.
And if they don't want to work, why would that impinge upon full employment, because what is the plan? Force people to work who are retired, or don't want to? Work or go to jail? "Full employment" is always presumed to be "people wanting to work can find it".
FWIW, I'm not saying we are at full employment for all possible specializations and geography's, clearly some are out and others are in and we have some of the most immobile labor we've seen in a while [1]. The problem, as with many things, is housing. People simply can't (and aren't) moving to where the jobs are.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5660752/why-americans-d...