The Unemployment Understatement

Nobody wants to see unemployment percentages rise but this Obama government is doing its very best to manipulate the numbers to its advantage. A letter to the editor by a William T. McCormick, Jr. of Florida in the WSJ dated 4/13/12 illustrates how the logic of numbers masks the seriousness of unemployment under the Obama regime and why there is a tension in the workforce considerably greater than the 8.2% reflects.

Quote: Your April 7 editorial "A Jobs Slowdown" correctly notes that the slightly lower March unemployment rate of 8.2% is due mainly to the reduction in the labor force participation rate. It is noteworthy that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the participation rate was very stable for the five years preceding the Obama administration, averaging 66.0% and staying between 65.8% and 66.2% over the 60 months from December 2003 through December 2008. The current participation rate of 63.8% is 2.2% lower than the pre-Obama period which, based on a current civilian labor force of 242.6 million, means that 5.3 million people have dropped out of the labor force over the past 3 1/2 years. If the BLS were to count these 5.3 million people as unemployed, the real unemployment rate would be 11.6%, not the 8.2% reported.

Because of this precipitous drop in the labor participation rate, we should all be questioning the methodology that counts unemployed versus dropouts from the labor force, since it has such a dramatic effect on the headline unemployment percent report. In any event, these people aren't unemployed, which explains why the BLS statistics show that the total number employed in March 2012 is 142.0 million, lower than the 142.2 million employed in January 2009, even though the civilian labor force has grown by 7.9 million people since January 2009, the month Mr. Obama took office. End quote.

So remember these calculations as we move inexorably toward November 6 and don't permit the Democrat partisans to mask the truth of Obama's frequent failures and follies.