4.7%

Administration claims that unemployment fell to 4.7% in May is belied by the latest Harris poll.

The Labor Department reported that the headline unemployment fell to 4.7 percent. That rate does not include those who did not actively look for employment during the month or the underemployed who were working part time for economic reasons.

The Harris poll indicates that 43% of the unemployed have given up looking and that the number of people not counted in the unemployment figures grew by 664,000 to 94.7 million. Of those in the not looking category, only 22% were voluntarily out of the workforce. Of those 94.7 million roughly 73 million have just given up.

 

The Big Lie

 

Or as Mark Twain said "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Jim Clifton, President and CEO of Gallup recently posted an article on how the Department of Labor is misleading the American people and the media is cheering them on.

The unemployment rate is not really 5.6%.

If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. That's right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news -- currently 5.6%

Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%.

What the government likes to trumpet from the rooftops is the U-3 rate or "Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force".  Please take note however that they get to define what the civilian labor force is and they exclude the long term unemployed who have just given up or those who are marginally employed or underemployed.  The U-3 rate  for Dec 2014 trumpeted above is 5.6%, the U-6 rate or "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" was 11.2% for the same period.  

It's also very important to always read the fine print:

NOTE: Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

Wait... it gets better:

Fewer Americans born in the U.S. have jobs now than were employed to November 2007, despite a working-age population growth of 11 million.  Almost one in every two jobs added since 2009 have gone to foreign-born workers. In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one-in-six jobs in January 2010.  Since November 2007, the number of working legal and illegal migrants has risen by two million, from 23.1 million in November 2007 to 25.1 million in November 2014.  But the number of Americans with jobs has fallen by 1.5 million, from 124 million in November 2007 to 122.6 million November 2014. The DC

Obama's Presidency in Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Here's three thousand and some...

Even by European PIIG standards, our spending is out of control...

Weekly Standard

Obama Beats Bush! Racks up same amount of debt as Bush, but in half the time!

CBS News

(CBS News) The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama's three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.

The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush's last day in office, which coincided with President Obama's first day.

Obama's "recovery" is the worst on record.  He is still over a million jobs short of just breaking even...

CNN

From the labor market's height in January 2008 to its bottom in February 2010, 8.8 million jobs were cut, and the unemployment rate soared as high as 10% in October 2009.

But only about half of those job losses -- or 4.3 million -- happened under his watch. (CNN)

The only reason unemployment isn't in double digits is because the dismal Obama economy has discouraged over 3.5 million Americans, leading them to completely abandon the job market.

The percentage of Americans 16 and older who are working or looking for work fell to 63.6 percent, the lowest since 1981. For men, the so-called "labor force participation rate" is at 70 percent. That's the lowest since the government started keeping records in 1948. (Yahoo)

And for a bonus, here's a reminder of what a big loser GM was for the taxpayer. Jeffrey Dimon's got nothing on Obama.  The Car Czar in Chief spent $100 billion to save a $34 Billion car company.  And GM still hasn't paid us back.

Obama Pushes False GM Success Story
WSJ - The Other GM Bailout

An Ebbing Tide Lifts Obama’s Boat

Giving up is the key to Obama’s reelection. Giving up on looking for a job, that is...

4 million Americans are so disgusted with Obamanomics that they have permanently abandoned the nation’s tattered workforce since the president took office, helping to keep the unemployment rate out of scary double-digit territory where it more properly belongs.

The simple calculation for unemployment before all the seasonal adjustments and so forth, is:

Unemployment Rate = Number of Unemployed / Total Labor Force

So the easy way to get unemployment down is to reduce the numerator in proportion to the denominator, and the easiest way to do that is to declare that the greatest number of unemployed workers are no longer looking for work, and therefore no longer “unemployed.” This shrinks the numerator relative to the denominator, making unemployment go down.

Obama is on track to be the only president to lose jobs during his term

This impressive feat beats even Herbert Hoover. He produced this horrible historic milestone by stopping drilling, shutting down pipelines and plane factories, and liberally slinging shovel-ready bureaucratic manure all over the place.  His economic record is abysmal.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to talk about just how catastrophic Obama’s job destruction record is. Here’s the wrong way:

Looking at the U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the discouraged and part-time workers, really doesn't tell us anything, because the ratio stays pretty much the same in good times and bad, so it’s a comparative wash to point out that “real” unemployment is closer to 16%. 

The same goes for trying to point to statistical tricks like seasonal adjustments, which explain how the economy could shed 1.5 million jobs between December and January yet still claim that unemployment fell from 8.5 to 8.3 and added 234,000 jobs. All administrations have played by these rules, so it’s not really a good point of criticism.

Here’s why Obama is a horrible president...

The absolute number of total jobs in the US has shrunk since President Obama was inaugurated; a catastrophe considering our population continues to grow. The shrinking participation (taking frustrated job-seekers out of the equation) is the key to masking Obama’s jobs destruction. Just this past month Obama's regime sliced off 88,000 job-seekers, sending them to statistical oblivion and improving his bottom line.

If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7 percent then vs. 63.7 percent today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.0 percent.

As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, “Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.” (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

Here’s the bad news for Obama:

If the participation rate does level off at its current rate, according to HPS, the economy would need to generate 231,000 jobs per month to get below 8 percent unemployment by Election Day (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

Now for the good news for the hopium smokers:

If the participation rate continues its downward slide, however, that number would be much lower—perhaps as low as 131,000 jobs a month (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

So as long as the overall number of jobs continue to shrink and the government continues to kick more and more workers out of the statistical labor force, the jobs picture will continue to look up for Obama, even as the economy sags and the number of Americans out of work increases.

And they say the GOP field is unelectable?

See also:  O-Man the Destroyer

O-Man the Destroyer

We conservatives get queasier by the day watching the slow-mo car wreck that is the GOP primary.  We don't all agree on who the nominee should be, but that's OK.  That's what primaries are all about.  I want to take a break from the internecine rock throwing and refocus our attention on what a dismal failure President Obama and his Obamanomics have been for this country.

Obama is a Jobs Destroyer

Thanks to the usual partisan government statistical manipulation, the unemployment rate supposedly inched lower, but the Obama economy remains a wreck.  Maggie at Maggie’s Notebook smells cooked books as well.  Check it out to understand the statistical games the Obamacrats are playing to hide just how bad the unemployment crisis really is.

Zero Hedge does an excellent job breaking it down it down as well.  The secret to Obama's jobs numbers is that the workforce has shrunk by millions, keeping the official unemployment rate artificially low.

Obama is a job destroyer, and he is on track to be the first president to have a net job loss during his tenure.    An impressive feat given the Democrat presidencies of FDR and Jimmy Carter.  The press will try to talk up the still sagging Obama economy, but that will only get him so far.  People out of work can't eat hope and change, although the OWS'ers are rolling it up and smoking it...

It’s no wonder Gallup’s electoral projection map that is based upon Obama approval reveals a vast sea of red dotted on the fringes by a few small blue islands of ignorance.

What’s Obama going to run on?  

Wasting billions on green energy failures?

Stealing $23 billion from taxpayers to reward failed Detroit Automobile tycoons and their Union Cronies?

Maybe he can run on giving us the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression, and we can all sing “Crappy Days are Here Again!”

For even more evidence that Obama is the Worst President in the History of The United States, see Daniel J. Mitchell's Obamanomics vs Reaganomics.  Reagan had America on a skyrocketing trajectory by this point in his presidency, and the reason is simple.  He did the opposite of what our Bumbler in Chief Obama is doing.

If you're still hungry for more evidence that Barack Hussein Obama is Caligula on Crack, read Quin Hillyer's His Abominations Accelerate.

Yes, Newt is a Republican progressive who makes my ears bleed, Romney and Santorum are big government statists, and Ron Paul is playing to the OWS rabble, but it's even worse for the Democrats.  Obama is all they got.