Friday, December 06, 2013

Great news for Obama

The unemployment rate for November actually hit 7.0%, great news for Obama, because it's been a year since it's been that low. Even better is that the Labor Force Participation Rate, which affects the unemployment rate, ticked up to 63.0%. (The LFPR counts those in the workforce. Not in the workforce, you can't be counted as unemployed, whether you're working or not.)

As I've detailed often before, Obama has benefited from a drastic drop in the number of people who are counted in the workforce. It has kept his "official" government-reported unemployment rate below ten percent, even though millions of more people are not working than when he took office. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's what the LFPR has done under Obama:

Labor Force Participation Rate since January 2009
Now. Since some people will think Obama's drop in workforce participation is just a continuation of an ongoing trend, here's the LFPR for the last ten years.

Labor Force Participation Rate since 2003
Flat for several years, with a decline beginning in January 2009 that accelerated and continues to this day, giving Obama an artificially low unemployment rate that makes all the headlines.

Congratulations. If you've read this far, then you've seen something the majority of Americans have no clue about.


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