Donald Trump's ridiculousness mucks up crucial national discussions we need to be having

One thing in the boatload of irksomeness that is Donald Trump is that he makes such ridiculous statements about important issues that the in-depth national discussion of them that we should be having is drowned out by the inevitable and wholly understandable guffaws and head shaking about his overall wackadoodliness.

That's the case with Trump's claim in an interview with Time that unemployment isn't 5.3 percent but actually 42 percent:

Don’t forget in the meantime we have a real unemployment rate that’s probably 21%. It’s not 6. I’s not 5.2 and 5.5. Our real unemployment rate–in fact, I saw a chart the other day, our real unemployment–because you have ninety million people that aren’t working. Ninety-three million to be exact.

If you start adding it up, our real unemployment rate is 42%.

Beneath the stupidity of this calculation is a matter of real concern. The nation's official gauges of unemployment and underemployment don't truly measure the healthiness or lack of it in the U.S. job situation. That's not because the staffers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are cooking the books. There are plenty of bureau statistics providing a fuller picture of what's actually going on. But the media focus on headline unemployment rates and new job creation rarely takes those into account.

For one thing, people are counted as employed if they worked 10 hours or even one hour a week in the previous month. There is plenty more that the current 5.3 percent unemployment rate papers over. Such as the continued weakness of wage growth.  

Those weaknesses, however, are not repaired by Trump's supercilious calculation.

Join me below the fold for more analysis.