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Chris Wysocki
Caldwell, NJ

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Friday, 06 April 2012

Oooh look, unemployment is down to 8.2%, if you live in a parallel universe

I stopped posting my Weekly Obama Jobs Reports because they got too repetitious. Week after week Obama did nothing to create jobs, and our economy is hardly what any sane person would label "robust." I ran out of mockery.

So imagine my chagrin when I saw that the White House is practically giddy with delight today because the March unemployment rate has dropped to 8.2%.

Chagrin? Why you partisan hack Wysocki! How dare you deny President Golf Pants his due!

Eh, it's quite easy, actually. The country only added 120,000 new jobs in March, hardly enough to produce anything close to a meaningful "recovery." The 8.2% unemployment figure is a fiction. A farce. Totally contrived.

Obama's minions can do that you know. Fudge the numbers. It's one of the few things they're actually good at. And before the rise of New Media they'd get away with doing it too.

Here's a dose of Reality. The official unemployment rate is so low because Obama only counts people who are actively looking for work. In other words, optimists. Or fools. (Optimists vote Republican, fools vote Democrat.) He conveniently leaves out the discouraged, the early retirees, and the part-timers.

1. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7% then vs. 63.8% today down from last month—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%.

2. But what if you take into the account the aging of the Baby Boomers, which means the labor force participation (LFP) rate should be trending lower. Indeed, it has been doing just that since 2000. Before the Great Recession, the Congressional Budget Office predicted what the LFP would be in 2012, assuming such demographic changes. Using that number, the real unemployment rate would be 10.5%.

3. Of course, the LFP rate usually falls during recessions. Yet even if you discount for that and the aging issue, the real unemployment rate would be 9.4%.

4. Then there's the broader, U-6 measure of unemployment which includes the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate, perhaps the truest measure of the labor market's health, is still a sky-high 14.5%.

5. The employment-population ratio dipped to 58.5% vs. 61% in December 2008. An historically low level of the U.S. population is actually working.

The real, unadulterated unemployment rate is at least 9.4%, and could be as high as 14.5%. And hardly anybody actually has a job.

Is that the Hope? Or the Change?

UPDATE 07 Apr 2012 11:12:
Linked at IOwnTheWorld.com. Thanks Cardigan!

Posted at 18:35 by Chris Wysocki [/economy] Comments | Perm Link |
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