How is it possible to have such a major drop in the unemployment rate from 9% to 8.6% when new jobs only came in at 120,000? Answer: Labor Force Participation down from 64.2% to 64.0% as more people leave the work force (315,000 to be exact), because there are no jobs out there. And the beauty of it from a statistical standpoint is that if you are not in the employment pool, you are not counted! Therefore, the unemployment rate will statistically be better. Wow! Don’t you just love statistics and how the BLS uses them? The only reason the unemployment rate went down was because people became so discouraged and frustrated that they could not find work they just gave up. Thus, the BLS considers that to be a positive improvement on the employment front. You got to me kidding me; but, of course, I am not. But, the Administration, news headlines, and mainstream financial pundits simply mentioned that the employment picture vastly improved, because the rate dropped from 9% to 8.6%. With such uninformed utterances for the real truth, I am reminded what Macbeth said: “It is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.”
Please pay very close attention to my next sentence. U.S. needs to generate 262,500 jobs per month to return to 2007 employment levels over the next five years. This means that unless that number of jobs is created each month for the next five years, America will have a higher unemployment rate in October 2016 than it did in December 2007. Now, how realistic is it that the US economy can create 15.8 million jobs in the next five years with our totally dysfunctional Congress?
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