Last Friday's job numbers showing that businesses created 151,000 jobs in October gave Barack Obama fodder for touting progress, but all is not as it appears. As the Heritage Foundation's Rea Hederman and James Sherk note in explaining the two surveys released by the U.S. Labor Department, "employment fell by a net 330,000 jobs ... the number of unemployed workers grew by 76,000 ... [and t]he median length of time workers stay unemployed rose from 20.4 weeks to 21.2 weeks." In fact, the only reason unemployment stayed at 9.6 percent is that "a net 462,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force and thus do not count as unemployed."
So bleak is the actual labor landscape that more than 25 percent of adult men are neither working nor looking for work, representing the highest recorded rate in post-war years. Overall, the labor force participation rate dipped to 64.5 percent, falling by 0.2 points.
According to Hederman and Sherk, at best, the job creation numbers signal only "a tepid recovery. At this rate, it will take years for the economy to recover the nearly eight million jobs lost during the recession." But not to worry. As Joe Biden says, "No doubt we're moving in the right direction."
Reposted from The Patriot Post Digest
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