The media and our President would never hype a misleading report to prop up Obama’s image would they?
Job market conditions in the United States were flat in November, as Gallup’s Job Creation Index remained at +14, similar to the range seen since May. This is another indication that Friday’s sharp drop to 8.6% in the government’s U.S. unemployment rate may be overstated.
Gallup’s Job Creation Index generally has been flat since it hit +14 in May. Still, it is up three percentage points from a year ago and remains higher than the monthly readings Gallup found throughout 2009 and 2010.
The Job Creation Index of +14 is based on 32% of workers nationwide saying their employers are hiring and 18% saying their employers are letting workers go — the same as in October. Hiring was at 30% and firing at 19% in November 2010.
I suppose the media and the liberals just overlooked the fact that while we added 120k jobs in November, 315k workers gave up completely on finding a job. And that’s not even mentioning the seasonal jobs that were hired due to the holidays.
For months, the administration has been monkeying with the unemployment figures to hide some of the trauma Obama has inflicted on the U.S. economy, but last week’s shameful cooking of the jobs report took it to a whole new level. To hear the government tell it, our unemployment rate plummeted nearly half a point in just a month to a level of 8.6%. And it did this on the strength of 120 thousand new jobs.
Now, I hate to quibble, but for the entire length of the Bush administration, we were told every month that it takes 125 to 150 thousand new jobs just to keep the unemployment rate stable. Suddenly that kind of growth under Obama sends our UE rate spiraling downward. What gives?
Well, thanks to great work and aggressive tweeting by economist and commentator Jim Pethokoukis — formerly of Reuters — we know what gives. The universe of potential workers is now so small that it is hiding how weak the employment situation is in our nation.
Without getting too bogged down in the weeds of employment statistics, the U3 — or headline rate — is what is considered “the” unemployment rate. That is what was reported at 8.6 this week. The U6 rate combines unemployed and “underemployed” and is at 15.6%. That’s a great indicator, but the newsmaker is U3.
The U3 rate is the percentage of the “participating labor force” that is unemployed. That is all well and good, except that the Obama labor department has decided that it will simply manipulate the definition of “labor force” to suit its own needs. And what the Obama administration has done is simply shrink the definition of the “labor force” by pretending that hundreds of thousands of non-working adults are no longer in existence for all intents and purposes.
If you are offended that under ObamaCare you may be considered “a unit,” you should know that under Obama employment stats you may not even exist! In fact, a lot of non-working adults who existed in October apparently no longer do exist officially.
In other words, in the universe Obama took over from George W. Bush, the unemployment rate would still be over 11%.
And even with all the number fudging the media still overlooks the fact that we have had an 8% plus unemployment rate going on 34 straight months now. The longest streak since 1948.
Oh, but it’s all getting better now. I mean what better way to celebrate the artificial decline in unemployment by our President taking a 17 day vacation?
Sigh….
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