The BLS reports unemployment has dropped .2 percent, to 8.1 percent. That’s good, right? The recovery is on the way! Well, not so much:
The reason the unemployment rate “edged down” is that 1.483 million people gave up and exited the workforce! The Department of Labor Lies doesn’t count anyone who gives up any longer, so the “unemployment rate” is claimed to have decreased. But what’s worse is that there were a net 868,000 fewer people with jobs in August over July, despite there being 212,000 more people of working age in the population. That’s right — net-on-net over one million fewer people (adjusted for population change) were working last month.
This is precisely why I said that it is more informative to look at the Employment-Population Ratio in the Greenberg interview last night. The U3 figure is very easily gamed by simply not counting people who are not employed as unemployed.