Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Is "Official" Unemployment Number a Fraud, too?

Short answer: Yes.

Can we all now agree that the government's "official" unemployment rate is a fraud?

Credit: CNS

November 12, 2013 - 11:33 AM
By Ali Meyer
(CNSNews.com)  The percentage of American civilians 16 or older who have a job or are actively seeking one dropped to a 35-year low in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In September, the labor force participation rate was 63.2 percent, but in October it dropped to 62.8 percent—the lowest it has been since February 1978, when Jimmy Carter was president.
When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent. By the beginning of 2013, the start of Obama’s second term, it had dropped to 63.6 percent. Since this January, it has continued to decline, hitting a 35-year low of 62.8 percent in October.
....
When someone drops out of the labor force and ceases to actively seek a job, they are no longer counted as “unemployed.” The BLS counts as “unemployed” only those who have actively sought a job in the last four weeks. The unemployment rate is the percentage of people in the labor force who did not have a job in the last four weeks but were actively seeking one.
.....
The number of Americans not in the labor force has climbed by 11,034,000 since Obama took office, rising from 80,507,000 in January 2009 to 91,541,000 in October.
Despite the 11,034,000 who have dropped out of the labor force since Obama took office, the national unemployment rate has remained at a relatively high level. In January 2009, it was 7.8 percent. Since then, it has never dropped below 7.2 percent, the level it hit this September before rising to 7.3 percent this October. October was the 59th straight month of 7-percent-plus unemployment in the United States.
Can we all now agree that the "Official" unemployment number is nothing but a farce? According to James Pethokoukis at AEI:
We need 8.0 million jobs to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate, and at the average rate of growth of the last 12 months, that won’t happen for another five years. There are currently roughl6.1 million missing workers, and if these workers were in the labor force looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent instead of 7.3 percent. [emphasis mine]
Do they really expect us not to check on such things?  Where is the MSM on this?  I mean I don't expect Morley Safer to do 20 minute piece on the fraud of the BLS unemployment numbers on 60 Minutes, but a 20-25 seconds paragraph on the evening news would nice...

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