A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million.
No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!
So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million.
Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.
Of course the lickspittle fellating tools of the Mainly Socialist Media are trumpeting the drop in the unemployment rate driven by the carnage in the work force as being the result of 200,000 new jobs.
Keep that comparison in mind: Obama created or saved 200,000 jobs, and at the same time created 1,200,000 new permanently unemployed.
Wow. At that rate, it won’t be all that long that only government workers have jobs, and everybody else will have dropped out of the labor force, giving us zero unemployment. So, hurrah!
(Also…think those new one point two million permanently unemployed, their families, and most of their friends will be voting for The Great Job Destroyer this fall?)
UPDATE: Maxed Out Mama says this Zero Hedge analysis is way off base:
MaxedOutMama: January Employment 2012
Update: Arggh – I’m reading some of the babble, and people are reporting the population adjustment effects as if they really happened in one month. Before pontificating, read the report, including the notes. That is all. End update.
I think I mentioned this last month, but every January the population basis is adjusted for the Household Survey.
This introduces discontinuities. These numbers honestly are not directly comparable to the previous month. Some of the basic ratios shouldn’t be that affected. Those are labor participation rate, which at 63.7% is a new low and may well have been affected (last month was 64%), the emp/pop ratio, which at 58.5% did not change from November or December but should be affected, and the unemployment rate, which fell again to 8.3%. That may have been affected. Nonetheless, the previous January the rate was 9.1%, so you can’t say that this isn’t improving. Also there was steady improvement in the previous few months, so another fall would not be unexpected.
I’ll bet a bunch will. Depends on how thoroughly they’re tied to the plantation and on how much they buy into “Evil Republicans will cut entitlements and leave you to starve”.