Unemployment rate drops, but does it really?

Not according to tweets by Jim Pethokoukis who is a Money & Politics columnist and blogger for Reuters:

Decline in July jobless rate was entirely due to a drop in the labor force, not an increase in share of workers w/ jobs

This one is even more revealing:

11.7% = Unemployment rate if active labor force was as big as it was when Obama took office. |The Big Shrink

So what we have here is what we’ve been seeing all along, which is reductions in the labor force when people have been deemed to quit looking for work. And resetting the labor force to what it was when Obama took office, which is very fair in my opinion, yields an unemployment rate of almost 12%.

Now if that isn’t depressing enough for you, check out this video by the AP this morning on the state of the American economy:

Welcome to Obama’s economy.


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