Fewer Americans Working Today (Than A Decade Ago)

Fewer total Americans work today than they did in 2001 and in 2009:

America’s overall labor force rate continues to fall, down to 63.7 percent in January, 2012:

Explaining Obama’s Fake Job Numbers - Conservative Byte shared Rush Limbaugh explanation on the job numbers:

Don’t ask me about seasonal adjustment. I’ve been trying to figure this out all morning, and I can’t. But the raw numbers, 130 million jobs in December, 128 million jobs in January, give or take a couple hundred thousand either side. But when the seasonal adjustments take place, there is a gain of 200, whatever they’re reporting, 33,000 jobs. Now, what’s happening is the labor force is shrinking. There are fewer jobs. Even the Drive-Bys, so excited, they can’t wait to report the good news, but even they are reporting that the labor force participation rate, number of jobs out there, is continuing to dwindle, and most of the jobs being created are low wage.

But none of that’s gonna matter. None of it’s gonna matter. I don’t want to be an “I told you so,” but way back last year, even recently toward the end of last year, this being an election year, I predicted. But you knew. You knew what was gonna happen when this year started. You knew that the statistics are that no president has ever been reelected when the unemployment rate’s over 8%. So guess what it’s gonna be by the time we get to Election Day? It’s just that simple.

I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, this seasonal adjustment business. Stick with me on this, folks. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “What is seasonal adjustment? Seasonal adjustment is a statistical technique that attempts to measure and remove the influences of predictable seasonal patterns to reveal how employment and unemployment change from month to month. Over the course of a year, the size of the labor force, the levels of employment and unemployment, and other measures of labor market activity undergo fluctuations due to seasonal events including changes in weather, harvests, major holidays, and school schedules. Because these seasonal events follow a more or less regular pattern each year, their influence on statistical trends can be eliminated by seasonally adjusting the statistics from month to month.”

So seasonal adjustment includes adjustment for the size of the labor force. I didn’t know that. Seasonal adjustment is not just what the guess is about the number of jobs from month to month. It also includes adjustment for the size of the labor force. And that’s how they’re able to play games with the labor force participation rate. So that might account for a big chunk of the difference here. One-point-two million — and this is their number — from December to January, 1.2 million people left the workforce, just left it. That’s the labor force participation rate, and they left. That’s half the number, or half the difference right there. If you take the number 132.9 jobs in December, 130.4 million in January, that’s 2.5 million fewer jobs, 1.2 million, about half of that that they just threw out in a seasonal adjustment of people that left the workforce.

I don’t know how they get the 1.2 million. They say it’s statistical. But what they did is reduce the overall number of jobs possible by 1.2 million. So fewer jobs is gonna bring down the unemployment rate because… If the labor force were what it is, or what it was when Obama was inaugurated 2009, the unemployment rate would be close to 10%. It’s only 8.3 because they have used seasonal adjustment to just say that last month, 1.2 million people gone from the workforce. No jobs anymore.

So the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at the loss of 2.5 million jobs, and they say, “Well, we think 1.2 million have just decided to give up looking for work so we won’t count half of them, just to make things more accurate.” And even with that major cheat, that still leaves more than a million-and-a-half lost jobs unaccounted for. Fewer people looking for jobs brings down the jobless rate. In this case, not more people finding jobs brings down the jobless rate. Fewer people looking for jobs is what’s bringing the unemployment rate down. There isn’t job creation going on. Not to the tune the regime wants you to believe it. It just isn’t happening.

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