John Merline at Investors Business Daily brings us this economic analysis that looks at the shrinking of the labor force under The Obama-Fuhrer. You may have noticed the recent release of figures from the government that claim the unemployment rate is coming down. Well that is, of course, a lie. And it is a lie that is manufactured using statistics in a very selective way. All you have to do is to ignore the jobs that have vanished during the last three years and then count the smaller number as the base from which you calculate the unemployment rate. If you have 100 houses and then you burn down 10 of them, and then you say “Look, all of our houses are in great shape; no problem at all,” you would have a similar situation. You just ignore the houses that have already burned down and pretend that they never existed. That is what The Obama-Fuhrer is doing and The Elite Media Monoculture is helping him to spread the lie and keep you from knowing the truth.
And it’s important to point out that this is something that has not happened in any of the post-world war II recoveries. During ordinary recoveries the job base expands again after a period of downturn. And as a rule a recovery starts up after about 18 months or so. It does not drag on and on as we are doing today. The poor status of the recovery that we are suffering under is the direct result of the Marxist policies that this administration is using to undermine the free market and to crush business and the private sector.
Most of you have noticed, I would think, that we are not in anything like a real recovery. Companies are not going out of their way to hire new workers, the housing market is still in the gutter, your investments have not come back from where they were and your cost of living has gone up while your salary has probably remained stagnant. Not exactly a record you would want to jump and shout about. Well, you know what you have to do about it in November, don’t you?
In the 30 months since the recession officially ended, nearly 1 million people have dropped out of the labor force — they aren’t working, and they aren’t looking — according to data from Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past two months, the labor force shrank by 170,000.
This is virtually unprecedented in past economic recoveries, at least since the BLS has kept detailed records. In the past nine recoveries, the labor force had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point, according to an IBD analysis of the BLS data.
According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago.
If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.
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