The national debt went over $16 trillion on the first day of the Democratic convention. Today the August jobs numbers were released. On the surface, it looked like good news for the President: the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3% to 8.1%, still a bad number, but a significant uptick. But looking behind the numbers, the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is very bad news for the country, and very bad news for Obama. Consider this: the labor-force participation rate dropped from 63.7% to 63.5%, and the civilian labor force dropped by 368,000. That's 368,000 people who dropped out of the labor force, either from retirement or, more likely, from discouragement. If the labor-force participation rate were what it was in January 2009 when Obama took office -- it was at 65.7% -- there would be more than 5 million more people looking for work. Thus, arguably the "true" unemployment rate is something closer to 11.5%.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the only data to look at that makes sense, that isn't artificial to some degree, is the employment-population ratio, because it measures the most basic data point -- how many of us are actually working. Here's what that graph looks like:
Obama's economic policies have kept us flat for the past three years, when we ought to have been recovering from the recession. He's failed, and he's got to go.
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