jobless shadows

The Shadow Unemployment Rate

… AND WHY IT’S NOT GOING TO IMPROVE ANYTIME SOON

While politicians at the state and national level continue to toast declining unemployment, the truth about America’s shrinking labor force is finally getting some attention.

In fact the mainstream media is now taking note of this depressing trend … which reveals that America’s “improving” employment situation is due in large part to the fact that people are fleeing the workforce.

“While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore,” reports CNN. “And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth. As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population.”

Wait … CNN reported that? The “Communist News Network?”

Yup … with a catchy “86 million invisible unemployed” headline to boot.

This phenomenon obviously isn’t “new news.”

Rick Manning of the group Americans for Limited Government delved into it extensively in a post published on our website two months ago.

“America’s unemployment rate no longer accurately reflects the state of the U.S. employment situation as a stand-alone statistic,” Manning wrote, pointing out that “the only employment statistic actually going down is the number of people who have hope that they will find a job in the Obama economy.”

(To read Manning’s post – which includes several informative charts and graphs – click here).

Why is this happening? Part of the problem is obviously an ongoing “jobless recovery,” but another big part of it is the ongoing expansion of America’s dependence economy – a welfare state that steadily expanded under George W. Bush and then exploded under Barack Obama.

Seriously … what did we think was going to happen when Obama’s stimulus completely undid Clinton-era welfare reform?

This trend is only going to get worse, too. According to the CNN report, the Federal Reserve of Chicago  predicts that the labor participation rate will drop to 62.4 percent over the next eight years – down from a peak of 67.3 percent in 2000.

Remember that stat the next time a politician tries to tell you that “happy days are here again.”

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