Congress continues to argue over the merits of extending a federal unemployment insurance extension this week and how to pay for it. The Washington Post reports today that Senate Democrats are working on an agreement for an 11-month extension of the federal unemployment benefits program that expired on December 28.

The Post further reports that the length of the extension would vary by state, based on unemployment rates. The new extension maximum (after 26 weeks of state benefits have been exhausted) would be reduced from the previous 47 weeks to 31 weeks, but with state by state variance:

"[Officials] said an additional six weeks would be available in states where unemployment is 6 percent or higher; an additional nine weeks in states with joblessness of 7 percent or higher; and 10 more in states where unemployment is 9 percent or more," reports the Post.

But the reality is that the true national unemployment rate is well over 10 percent. The percentages reported by the Post (and almost all mainstream media outlets) are based on the misleading U3 unemployment rate, rather than the U6 rate that provides a much clearer and more sobering picture of the American economy. The U3 rate is the official unemployment rate. It attempts to quantify the percentage of the total workforce who are unemployed and actively looking for work.

But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks several other rates as well. The U3 rate does not include underemployed members of the workforce who have settled for part-time jobs because they can't land full-time jobs, nor does it include "discouraged" workers who have become so frustrated with the job market that they've given up actively looking for work. Adding these two sectors of the workforce to the U3 rate yields a much higher figure that the BLS tracks as the U6 rate.

The U3 rate understates the "official" unemployment rate to keep it in single digits. But the U6 rate shows that unemployment in the United States has been in double digits since the financial crisis of 2008. The U6 currently hovers around 13 percent, almost double the reported U3 rate. Macrotrends.net offers a chart that allows comparison of the U3, U5 (including "discouraged" but not underemployed workers) and U6 rates from 1994 to the present:

"Think about this for a minute. The BLS admits that the US unemployment rate that includes people who have been discouraged about finding a job for less than one year is 13.2%. The official line is that the US economy has been enjoying a recovery since June 2009. How is there a recovery when 13.2% of the population is unemployed?" asked Paul Craig Roberts in a column at Counterpunch.org in December. Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and a former editor of the Wall Street Journal.