Cutting Through the President’s Employment BS

We’re a week out from the Bureau of Labor Standard’s Employment Situation Report, which gives the latest unemployment numbers. As always, I’ll be plotting up the results using my own metric (full-time jobs divided by civilian population) for assessing the health of the job market. Last month it looked like this:

But why, you may fairly ask, do you have your own metric? Why not just use the BLS’s metrics, like the U-3 number or the U-6 number?

Well, it all started back 2010, when I realized that the number of people leaving the job market was grossly distorting job numbers. In addition, a shift from full-time to part-time jobs was making the job numbers look better than they actually were. My metric accounts for both those effects.

I’m mentioning this now because of today’s post at Investor’s Business Daily, which talks about the inadequacy of the metrics touted by President Obama in his delusional statements about the miracles he has wrought with the economy:

Obama talks about 14.4 million new jobs since 2010, without noting that working age population grew by 15.8 million over those same months.

He touts the 5% unemployment rate, but fails to mention that it would be more like 10% if millions of Americans hadn’t given up looking for work altogether.

The president is fond of citing these cherry-picked statistics – one of his favorites is talking about consecutive months of job growth, which is completely meaningless. But whenever he trumpets these misleading and self-serving statistics, I think that a quick glance at the chart above will help cut through the confusion and give you a fair and more accurate impression of where the job market really is.

And, as you can tell, it’s still years away from complete recovery.