Below you will find the Department of Labor’s Employment Status Report for January 2013. The low-information voters wouldn’t believe how bad it is when the news reports typical to the AP broadcast (below) is all they may hear.
Note that the Associated Press can’t objectively report a statistic. Saying “almost 160,000” jobs were created when the number is 157,000. The mood Aaron Katersky creates is like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
For starters, and you’ll never hear this from the mainstream media, in order to keep up with population growth and retirement rates, a ‘break-even‘ point in job creation is 250,000 a month. Any numbers below that means we are going backwards.
The January report shows 157,000 new jobs created, non-farm. That’s the category the media looks at. That was down from the month before (Dec. 2012) when 196,000 jobs were created. But the inquisitive media won’t tell you that.
Month after month, the President and his compliant media drum the point that jobs are being created every month. “It’s not as much as we’d like,” he says. That’s a better way to say “our way of creating jobs isn’t working, hasn’t worked, but we believe that eventually it will.” It is true that jobs are being created every month, but it is in spite of, not because of, Obama’s policies or his recently disbanded Jobs Council. We are going backwards.
Also missing from the AP’s (and everyone else’s) account is the fact that 169,000 jobs were lost. Those are 169,000 people who are out of work, and no longer counted as unemployed, even though they are, because they gave up looking for work. The DOL calls it the “labor participation rate.” In total, that number is 8.5 million people since Obama became President. Even with the DOL’s massaging the numbers via the workforce participation rate, the real unemployment number, the U-6, is 15.4% (see Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization). The “seasonally adjusted” unemployment percent is 14.4%.
The media parrots what the DOL says. For example, the report begins with this . . .
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 157,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 7.9 percent. . .
What do they mean by “essentially unchanged?” The Dec. rate was 7.8%. It went up.
While you hear this AP radio news broadcast, listen too how they put lipstick on the fact that the economy has contracted over the last quarter. Not mentioning that the unemployment rate went up. No thought of a double dip recession, just the optimistic hope of a recovery later on.
Now, raise your hand if you think the media would ignore any of this if there were a Republican in The White House. Now, what are you going to do about it?
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