Obama: Hiding the Unemployed Just to Jack the Numbers

There’s so much hidden unemployment in the labor force that even Friday’s improved jobs numbers failed to decrease the official unemployment rate of 8.3 percent.

In February, the private sector added 233,000 new jobs, but 476,000 non-working people began looking for a job. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) rules, only by seeking work did those individuals officially become unemployed.

That’s because BLS does not count workers as unemployed unless they have actively searched for work in the last four weeks. As a result, millions of non-working people are not counted as unemployed by BLS officials.

The statistical quirk is the flip side of the administration’s effort to minimize the high level of unemployment for the last three years, and it may hinder progressives’ efforts to claim victory on the jobs front in November.

If more non-working people begin searching for jobs, “the economy is going to have to create an average of 246,000 jobs between now and November, just to keep the unemployment rate at eight percent, and so we are not even at that pace yet,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, an economist and the president of the American Action Forum.

If the BLS rules weren’t in place, the current unemployment rate would be somewhere around 11 percent, analysts say. The unemployment number would be as high as 15 percent if part-time workers seeking full-time employment were recognized in the unemployment rolls.

...For some people, “it appears that we are looking at a world where expectations are so low that 8.3 percent unemployment is okay,” Holtz-Eakin told The Daily Caller.

“It shouldn’t be [because] there are millions of Americans out there who would like to get jobs and have those jobs cover their monthly bills... _DC

Obama is hiding millions of unemployed people, just to keep the unemployment rate at a miserable 8.3%. If those unemployed begin to show up suddenly, driving even the artificially minimised official unemployment rate even higher, what will Obama do? Adopt the Auschwitz solution, and hide them away in concentration camps? Or worse?

The real world would be a terrible disappointment to the idealistic Barack Obama, if he were able to see it as it is. He deserves much better, of course. Try not to get in the way of Mr. Obama's vision of what he thinks the world is really like.