In December, 7.5 million people – 4.7 percent of the labor force – weren't working but were actively looking for a job. Those are the official unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Labor Department's professional statistical agency. President-elect Donald Trump, however, claimed this week that the real number of people who want a job but can't find one is 96 million – nearly 20 times as large.

Fact-checkers have explained the dishonesty of Trump's claim over and over, yet Trump repeats it undeterred. It's true that the official statistics show that 96 million people aged 16 and older (and not in the military, prisons or other institutions) were neither working nor officially unemployed in December. Only a small fraction of them, however, fit Trump's description and want a job but can't find one. Most want to be retired, in school or home tending to family responsibilities.

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BLS derives its monthly unemployment statistics from a survey of 60,000 households that asks people questions about their employment status. The agency classifies people as employed if they have a job and unemployed if they're not working but are available for work and have recently looked for a job. The 152 million people with a job and the 7.5 million unemployed make up the labor force. Of the 96 million people not in the labor force, 90 million reported that they didn't currently want a job.

That leaves about 5.5 million people who say they want a job but aren't classified as unemployed. Some of them haven't looked for work in the past year; others have but aren't currently available to work (for reasons such as illness or child care responsibilities). The rest, identified as "marginally attached" to the labor force, are available to work and have looked for a job in the past year but not in the most recent four weeks.

Ideally, we'd like our unemployment measure to include everyone who doesn't have a job but likely would be looking for one in a strong labor market. But the true intentions of the 5.5 million who say they want a job but aren't actively looking are unknowable, especially those who haven't looked in over a year. Conversely, some of those who say they don't want a job now might start looking in a stronger labor market.

There's no conspiracy to hide the "true" unemployment rate by excluding these people. In fact, since 1976 BLS has published alternative unemployment measures along with the official rate. It introduced the current measures in 1994. One alternative measure adds the subset of the marginally attached who have stopped looking because they're discouraged over their job prospects. Another adds all the marginally attached.

The broadest measure – known as U-6 to data aficionados – adds, along with the officially unemployed and the marginally attached, those who want to work full time but can only find part-time work. U-6 recorded its highest reading on record in the post-1994 data in November 2009 (17.1 percent when the official unemployment rate was 10.5 percent). Like all unemployment indicators, U-6 has fallen dramatically in recent years and In December 2016, was 9.2 percent. It is, however, the only measure that still exceeds its pre-recession level.