The “official” unemployment rate (U3) released each month is, to put it in the most straight-forward way possible, a completely misleading and politicized statistic.
The U3 unemployment rate, which is one of 6 ways the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the amount of people out of work, is defined as the “total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”
This is the 4.7% number which came out today and the statistic that soon-to-be former President Barrack Obama has boasted so proudly over.
You remember this, right? …
Obama: “I took an economy that was about to go into a Great Depression, and we’ve now had a little over six years of straight economic job growth, an unemployment rate that’s down below 5 percent, and incomes that have gone up and poverty that has gone down.”
Well, today we found out that a record number of Americans are not in the labor force and are not even looking for a job, the same way it was when Obama first stepped into office.
The final jobs report of Obama’s presidency revealed that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009.
In December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 95,102,000 Americans were not in the labor force, 47,000 more than in November.
Hmmm…
They said the unemployment rate was 4.7%! How can that be! The U.S. population is only about 325,340,300 people!
As explained above, the “official” number only calculates the number of unemployed persons as a percent of the civilian labor force.
So, let’s now take the amount of folks who are not in the labor force and get the percentage of the population that this group accounts for. (I’ll use a calculator just so I know Obama never lied to me!)
*GASP
The reality of the unemployment situation inside the U.S. is much grimmer than any politician or bureaucrat would ever want to admit.
And just to highlight how bad the situation is, those people counted as “not in the labor force” qualify to be a part of that statistic because they are no longer looking for work.
It is unrevealing statistics like the U3 unemployment rate that allows politicians to grandstand and pose as your leader.
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