The mainstream media is heralding the decline of the official unemployment rate to 7.7 percent as evidence that the U.S. economy is improving. But it is a giant lie. The truth is that unemployment in America is not actually going down. The percentage of working age Americans with a job actually dropped slightly in November. During the last recession, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to under 59 percent and it has stayed there for 39 months in a row. In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place! So how in the world are they able to pretend that the "unemployment rate" is going down steadily? Well, they get there by pretending that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers "leave the labor force" each month. According to the government, another 350,000 Americans left the labor force during November, and when you keep pretending that huge chunks of workers "disappear" each month it is easy to get the "unemployment rate" to go down. But any idiot can see that there is something really funny about these numbers. Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans "not in the labor force" has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really "off" about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans "not in the labor force" only rose by about 2.5 million. At this point the official unemployment rate is so manipulated that it is of very little value at all.
But the mainstream media is just eating up this "good news". They are very excited that the "unemployment rate" has fallen from its peak of 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 7.7 percent now...
But if unemployment was actually going down, we should be seeing the percentage of Americans with a job go up.
Unfortunately, that is NOT happening.
As I mentioned above, the "employment rate" fell below 59 percent during the last economic crisis and it has stayed there for 39 consecutive months...
So all of that stuff about the employment situation getting better is just a load of nonsense. The percentage of Americans with a job has stayed very, very steady since the end of 2009. It is almost as if someone has hit a "pause button" and won't let unemployment get better or get worse.
This is the first time since the end of World War II that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back in a significant way after a recession has ended.
To me, that is a very bad sign.
I also find it very interesting that the government revised the "job gains" for September and October downward in this recent report...
The government revised down job gains for September and October by a total 49,000. September's additions were revised from 148,000 to 132,000 and October's, from 171,000 to 138,000.
So it turns out that the glowing employment reports from those months that helped get Obama re-elected were really not that great after all.
The truth is that it takes somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population. So at best we are treading water.
And who is "creating" those new jobs?
According to an analysis performed by CNSNews.com, 73 percent of the jobs "created" over the past 5 months have been "created" by government.
But government does not create real wealth.
Real wealth is only created by the private sector.
It would be very nice if I could report a major employment turnaround, but it simply is not happening.
Instead, we continue to see an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty.
