The German Unemployment Rate

This got brought up today by Focus, in their business news, and it's an interesting political-business-economic issue.

For a number of months, AfD (the anti-immigrate party).....has touched on other topics besides asylum and migration.  One of those topics.....the unemployment rate.  They say the government's official unemployment rate.....is rigged up.  True or false.

Well....Focus sat down and looked at the rules used by the German government.   The trend says that unemployment for months and months....has been declining.  If you look at official numbers from mid-summer....across Germany....the average unemployment rate is 3.7-percent.  In most countries....it's about as good as you could ever expect, and everyone is fairly happy with the low rate.

AfD says after they take seats in the Bundestag....they want an examination of the rules and the official rate. Is this all worth talking about?

The gate-keepers for the government will say with pride that they are taking the law given to them, and performing the unemployment rate count by the law.  Is the law screwed up?

Some people think another one-million people are out there and hidden outside of the counting system.

An example....a Job-Center could create an education-training program where sixty unemployed people show up for twelve weeks of computer training.....mostly to just learn Microsoft Word/Excel. The fact that you could have done this orientation in two weeks....usually isn't mentioned.  The idea is that you shift the sixty people into a training situation....not an unemployed situation....and the sixty don't count as unemployed.  Pumping up the training program to last a fairly long period....in hopes that the sixty might be offered a job and ease out of unemployment?  Well....yeah, that's the idea.  Is it reasonable to run a training program like this for twelve weeks instead of two?  It's just the way that the gimmick is designed.

No one ever talks about the training groups throughout the sixteen states, or how their numbers change from month to month.  Maybe they would add up to most of this hidden million that is talked about by AfD.

Could this mean that the real rate of unemployment is closer to 6-percent?  No one can say with any real certainty.

So you come back to what the AfD wants to do in the Bundestag, and the odds that the CDU-CSU-SPD coalition government will fight to keep any examination from occurring.  Even if you did come to admit the training program is hiding numbers, and that some long-term unemployed folks aren't counted any longer.....then what?  You'd have to make up new rules on counting the unemployed and invent more creative ways of hiding the bad news.