The Lunch Counter has documented over and over how the unemployment numbers are phony, in that they don’t mean that more people are working as that percentage goes down. The Left and its compliant media don’t know, or won’t tell you, that the reason the percent of unemployment is dropping is not because more people are working but because more people gave up looking for work (in Obama’s depressed economy) than found jobs. The labor force participation fell 347,000 from Nov 2013 to Dec 2013. When the unemployment rate declines, we want to see both employment and participation increase as discouraged workers return to the labor force. Today, we got the former, but not the latter.
The civilian labor force participation rate declined by 0.2 percentage point to 62.8 percent in December, offsetting a change of the same magnitude in November. In December, the employment- population ratio was unchanged at 58.6 percent. The labor force participation rate declined by 0.8 percentage point over the year, while the employment-population ratio was unchanged. (See table A-1.)
It will be interesting to see how the Administration spins the drop in unemployment rate and the jobless recovery. What do I mean by “jobless recovery” when 74,000 jobs were created in December 2013? When you consider that about 250,000 jobs need to be created each month just to break even with population growth and retirement turnover, we’re going in the wrong direction, and have been for years.
Next time you hear someone tout the good unemployment numbers, ask them how the unemployment percent goes down when fewer people are working than at any time since the Jimmy Carter era. In terms of jobs and employment, President Obama is Jimmy Carter’s second term.
The BLS keeps track of total, as in real, unemployment which they call the U-6. This number includes people they quit counting that causes the published unemployment “rate” to go down. That’s the figure The White House shamelessly champions to say how the recovery is real yet “not as good as we’d like.” The U-6 unemployment percentage is 13%. (see table A-15)
Link: Bureau Of Labor Statistics Employment Situation for December 2013.
