When a rising jobless rate is a good omen

T HE Labor Department

on Friday will announce the unemployment rate for December, and the result will present to President-elect

Donald Trump a great opportunity to align himself with what Americans already know about the job market.

The jobless rate is expected to rise from 4.6 percent in November to 4.7 percent last month. But both of those numbers are laughable and Trump has already said — including in an interview with me in May — that the figures misrepresent what’s really going on.

It’s time for the president-elect to say it again.

The first problem with the unemployment rate is the way it’s gathered. It’s been years since I broke the story about how surveyors for the Census Bureau were cheating when they went to people’s homes to ask their employment status.

That problem has probably been fixed, except that, without the cheat- ing, the surveyors are now getting many fewer responses. This throws the reliability of the surveys into question.

The second problem occurs once the figures are gathered.

The Labor Department takes the numbers provided by the Census Bureau and comes up with several different unemployment rates. The one that showed 4.6 percent unemployment in November doesn’t include most of the people who have given up looking for work because they don’t think any suitable jobs for them exist.

When you add in just some of the people who have quit looking, or who have taken part-time jobs because they couldn’t find full-time gigs, the unemployment rate jumps to 9.3 percent.

That’s the Labor Department’s number — called the U-6 — and it doesn’t include people who haven’t looked for a job in more than a year.

If you include all those “discouraged workers,” as they are referred to, the jobless rate is . . . nobody really knows, but it could be around 20 percent, according to experts who make their own calculations.

Most folks already understand why the unemployment rate is misleading, thanks to people like me who’ve been shouting about it for years.

But many don’t, and that is where the PEOTUS could have a problem.

When the economy starts doing better — or maybe I should say “if ” the economy gets better — the unemployment rate should rise. Why? Because as the prospects of finding a job improve many of those discouraged workers will again start looking.

And that’ll make these new job seekers show up in the calculations as unemployed, making the jobless rate climb. In fact, that may already be happening.

So if Trump actually succeeds in getting the economy to perform better, the unemployment rate will be telling the opposite story. And that, too, may already be happening.

The experts also believe that 185,000 new jobs were created in December. If that’s the number, it will be slightly better than the 178,000 in November.

Trump already understands the problem with job growth: The pace of expansion hasn’t been fast enough to absorb even the number of people trying to enter the workforce for the first time — much less those who were laid off during the Great Recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis, and since.

And assumptions and guesses make the monthly job gains figure completely inaccurate.

You never know what to expect in New York City. Sometimes, you even get a pleasant surprise, like I did on the subway — yes, on the subway — on New Year’s Eve.

I was taking the No. 1 train downtown from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on West 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue at about 8:30 p.m.

At the 103rd Street stop, a group of cute, well-dressed boys and girls got on. They were about 8 years old.

I could see in the distance that they were showing the contents of a loose-leaf folder to people, most of whom were shooing them away as is the tradition in subway cars.

A passenger near me gave one of the boys a dollar. They chatted, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

The boy then walked right past me. I thought I had been passed over until a little girl in a brightly colored winter jacket stopped in front of me.

So I got a dollar out and, as I always do, I asked what cause she was collecting for. But she was showing me drawings she had created, so I really didn’t understand.

“It’s a business,” she replied. I still didn’t get what she meant, but I gave her the buck anyway.

The folder was still open when she said, “Which one do you want?”

Ah! I finally got it. She and the others were selling their artwork. The guy next to me had chosen not to take a drawing, he later told me, because he told the boy that he didn’t have any place to put it.

Neither did I. But I didn’t want to insult my little business kid, so I took a purple picture of a heart and she thanked me.

Since it’s the New Year, I don’t want to even think that anyone was exploiting these kids. Or that they were pulling some kind of scam. I’d like to think that some mother or father — and I’m sure there was one somewhere in the subway car — was trying to teach these kids an urban brand of entrepreneurship.

I had to fold the little girl’s picture, but I waited until she and the others had moved into another car.

The drawing by little Jannah is now on my refrigerator with the rest of my valuable art collection.