Now I have never claimed to be any sort of an economist. Nor am I anywhere near to being smart enough to figure out how they go about doing what they do. But having said all that, I do know that when one knows what one’s doing, one can pretty much make numbers say whatever one wants them to say. And a good example of that is how on Friday the Labor Department released figures that supposedly showed us the biggest gains in job creation in more than two years and an unemployment rate at its lowest since the height of the recession. But did they?
Because if there is one thing that we all should have learned by now from having watched this current gang over at the White House for the past five years, it’s that we should never, ever, take things at face value. And these latest figures are yet another perfect example of why that remains the case. Because these figures disguise the much less promising news that hundreds of thousands of people simply quit looking for work. So the big news here should not be the number of jobs created, but those folks who are apparently no longer looking for work.
The April jobs report supposedly showed a gain of 288,000 jobs, with a larger than expected drop in the unemployment rate from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent, which is the lowest rate since October 2008. But I’m not sure how many are focused on the fact that a very significant portion of that drop, is due to nothing more than the fact that the labor force effectively shrunk by 806,000 people in April, to what is a 35-year low. And yet Barry’s boob of a Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez still had the balls to say, "I consider 288,000 jobs created to be significant progress."
So what we had as of the end of April is a record 92,594,000 Americans who were no longer in the labor force, and the labor force participation rate that matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, at least according to the numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In March, also according to BLS's non-seasonally adjusted data, there were 91,630,000 Americans not in the labor force. In April, that increased by 964,000 people to an all-time record of 92,594,000. The previous record was 92,534,000, set in January of this year.
Only the government could come up with such a bizarre way to calculate the unemployment rate where the rate can actually go down even when the number of those people who are employed also goes down. In April, the civilian noninstitutional population of people 16 and older was 247,439,000. Of these, according to the BLS's 155,421,000 participated in the labor force, down 806,000 from the 156,227,000 who participated in the labor force in March. That yielded the labor force participation rate of 62.8 percent--matching the 36-year low.
Now of those 155,421,000 folks who participated in the labor force in April, 145,669,000 were employed and 9,753,000 were unemployed. The 9,753,000 who looked for a job and did not find one, and thus were "unemployed," equaled 6.3 percent of the 155,421,000 still in the labor force, yielding an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent. In March, in the then-larger civilian labor force of 156,227,000, there were 10,486,000 who actively sought a job and did not find one, yielding an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent.
Back when Barry first assumed office there were 80,507,000 people who were not in the labor force. As mentioned earlier that number has now ballooned to 92,594,000, taking place either because people were unable to find a job or because they were able to garner for themselves one of the many entitlement programs that Barry has been actively encouraging them to take full advantage of. Now as of April, the civilian noninstitutional population of people 16 and older, or those folks that are essentially of working age in this country, was 247,439,000.
Now as far as I’m concerned, the fact that we could lose over 800,000 people from the labor force in a single month and still see a decrease in the unemployment rate makes it pretty clear just how much of farce our current unemployment figure of 6.3 percent really is. Because imagine what that 6.3 figure would be if even half of those 12 Million folks who have left the labor force over the course of the last 5 years, were still classified as being ‘IN’ the labor force. What we have going on here is creative accounting at it’s best and it has no basis in reality!
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