By Rick Manning
The Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has made a startling discovery courtesy of the far left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the actual employment rate, has stunk since Obama took office.
Klein even published two charts that he was provided which originated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to prove the point.
The Klein story titled, “This graph calls the entire economic recovery into question,” falls into the ultimate no duh category.
Wow, what might be next in the once proud pages of the Post?
Man Lands on Moon
Hurricane Katrina may hit New Orleans
Hitler invades Poland
Lincoln and misses schedule night out at the theatre
The far left Rip Van Winkle columnist asserts, “The core issue here is that the unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work. That means there are two ways to leave the ranks of the unemployed. One way — the good way — is to get a job. The other way is to stop looking for work, either because you’ve retired, or become discouraged, or begun working off the books.”
Of course, even in this admission Klein misses the other and more dangerous way to not be counted, don’t enter the workforce at all, which is exactly the option that is being forced upon young people who can’t find a conventional job in Obama’s economy.
Sure would have been nice if Klein and his fellow Obama sycophants in the media had stumbled upon the fact that the falling unemployment rate was almost entirely due to people dropping out of the workforce before November 2012.
But the good folks advocating for increased government spending weren’t pushing a narrative about the false drop in the unemployment rate before the election, and all those economic stories that actually look at real statistics and numbers are just so boring. It is much easier for the posers of the intellectual left to just rewrite the press releases the White House sends them rather than actually spend five minutes looking behind the numbers.
Google is just so cumbersome.
Or he could just talk to his fellow Washington Post Wonkblogger Brad Plumer who wrote in his May 4, 2012 article titled, “The incredible shrinking labor force,” “If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent.”
At least, Klein’s article should earn him the distinction of being identified as the kid trying to enter the Midvale School for the Gifted in the classic Gary Larson Far Side Cartoon (see above).
Now that we are all on the same page regarding the state of employment in America, here are a couple of key data points that Mr. Klein should consider in the just released July 2013 jobs report.
The reported unemployment rate is 7.4 percent, but the total unemployed rate, or U-6 rate is 14 percent as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS writes that the U-6 rate measures, “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.”
One other significant measure is to do exactly what his colleague Brad Plumer did in his article, and extrapolate what the unemployment rate would be if the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office.
Spoiler Alert: The July unemployment rate using this calculation would be 10.6 percent, and the U-6 rate would be 17 percent. All told, 21.8 million people cannot find full-time work in the Obama economy.
So now the only question is will Mr. Klein continue to advocate for an expansion of the same failed big government policies that have brought us this failed economy falling victim to the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, or will he learn and come over from the dark side?
Somehow I doubt Mr. Klein’s discovery of BLS data will cause him to have any epiphanies.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government.
