Re: Bernie Sanders and his “real unemployment” talking point:
The 9.9% unemployment rate he was referring to is U6 unemployment, a broader measure of employment that includes discouraged workers, marginally attached workers (i.e. workers that are kind of looking for work but not really) and people who want to work full-time but can only work part-time for economic reasons than the U3 measure typically used by the government. But as this chart comparing U3 rates and U6 rates from 1994 - 2016* shows, the U6 rate tracks very closely with U3 rates:
So Sanders is technically right that unemployment is higher than the 4.9 unemployment rate might suggest, but it’s misleading as U6 unemployment has ALWAYS been about 5 points higher than U3 unemployment over a 22-year period; it really doesn’t tell us much about the state of economy at all.
*The U6 rate was created in 1994, so this is all the data there is comparing the two rates.