The President’s jobs council was only in existence for two years. It only met four times, and not at all in the last year. Whatever its usefulness, the president’s Jobs Council is history. The White House claims the jobs numbers out this morning vindicate Obama’s decision.
The only thing the January jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics prove is that jobs aren’t even on Obama’s to-do list.
The headline number is that 7.9% of Americans are out of work, up from 7.8%. If you include the 8 million people who are working part time who want full time work or who are working below their skill level the unemployment rate is 14.5%.
If you dig into the numbers in the official report, you will find a section of people “Not In The Labor Force.”
There are 3.6 million individuals who were not counted in the above statistics because they didn’t look for work in the last four 4 weeks. 208,000 are so discouraged they quit looking for work altogether. The rest didn’t look for other reasons – school, caring for sick family members, and so forth.
Let’s look at this another way. If there were jobs galore and everybody who wanted it had full time work, there would be 26 million more people happily working in gainful employment. That’s 16.8% of the population.
That’s how they calculated unemployment back during the Great Depression. Other than a couple of peaks in the above graph, we’re right up there.
That’s our real unemployment rate. Over twice what the government is reporting. 26 million people whom Obama could care less about.
Obama’s #1 priority right now is unconditional amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants.
