The media continues to gleefully report the "good news" that unemployment fell once again, this time to a reported 8.5%. Some of this is certainly due to seasonal hiring around the holidays, as is expected every year. The problem is that we are not getting full reporting from the media, who hide the real numbers from the public because it would hurt Barack Obama if people were to know the full depth of the unemployment numbers. I think that most people instinctively know that the unemployment numbers being thrown around don't really add up. All they have to do is look around their communities and at their friends who are out of work, many for 6 months or more, to understand that the economy has not turned around. At best it is stagnant, and at worst, continues to decline. Obama said that "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig". Obama and his acolytes can continue to trumpet glowing numbers about unemployment and the economy, but it doesn't change the fact the this economy is a pig.
Real Jobless Rate Is 11.4% With Realistic Labor Force Participation Rate
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people "drop out" of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population. In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate.
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