Painfully Grotesque Propaganda...

That's Tyler Durden's apt characterization of the latest news on the job front.  The lamestream media was full of the “drop” in the unemployment rate (from 7.7% to 7.6%) and the lower-than-expected new jobs (about 40% of the consensus economist forecast, which just shows you how much that is worth.

That's the propaganda.  The truth is much more dismal: the unemployment rate only went “down” because of an accounting trick I've discussed here many times before – the so-called “discouraged” workers are removed from the calculation altogether.  If you actually want work, but you've given up looking for a job (because there aren't any!), you're not counted as unemployed.  That makes sense only on Planet Politics, certainly not here on Earth.

A much more useful number is the labor force participation rate: the percentage of adults who are actually working.  This month it dropped to 63.3%, the lowest since 1979.  My readers of a certain age will recall that year as the height of the Jimmy Carter “stagnation” recession – absolutely awful economic conditions and a huge national debate about how to recover from it (this eventually helped propel Ronald Reagan into office).  Now with the same labor force participation rate, we're being told that we're in the midst of a “slow, steady recovery”.

Well, pardon me for being skeptical.  I hear the drums of doom, drawing ever closer...

Here's a graph showing the labor force participation rate since 1979.  With our current population of about 310 million, each percentage point is millions of jobs.  More information here and here...