2/03/2012

Whitewash! Administration Celebrates 8.3% Unemployment While 1.2 MILLION Fall Out of Labor Force In One Month

Posted by Brian
The media campaign to reelect Barack Obama has begun in earnest. While touting a new unemployment rate of 8.3%, the media fail to report, if they are even interested in reporting the truth, that to get to that number the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to eliminate 1.2 million people from the labor pool. It also completely ignores a CBO report released just 4 days ago that the real unemployment rate is 10%.

The civilian labor force fell to a 30 year low of 63.7%, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics is looking to eliminate nearly 50% of the available pool from the calculation. This is nothing but a mathematics trick to make it appear that the economy is improving by simply making the available labor force appear smaller.

We can expect more of these kind of shenanigans from the Obama administration, as well as fawning treatment from a sympathetic media and other friends of Obama in the bowels of government.

Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us:

Cooking The Books? Labor Force Participation Drops As Administration Reports 8.5% Unemployment

Posted by Brian
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

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2012 10:23 -0500

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.