Crush Liberalism

Reuters sees great news in new unemployment numbers; realists, not so much

al-Reuters goes to bat for their boy:

Job growth surges, jobless rate near 3-year low

The economy created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to a near three-year low, giving a boost to President Barack Obama as campaigning heats up ahead of November elections.

Hey, that’s awesome news!  Except for the fact that it isn’t:

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: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. …

Again, when people stop looking for work because the economy sucks way too bad to be producing jobs at the levels needed to perpetuate a recovery, those people simply aren’t counted against the unemployed.  A hospital has a certain number of sick people, but when some of those sick people die, you don’t exactly see the hospital celebrating the drop in the number of sick people there, now do you?

Expect more stories like this: Chairman fiddles while the USA smolders, and the MSM is dutifully doing its part in this election year to get ObaMao re-elected.

February 3, 2012 - Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, media bias, Obama