The website The Economic Populist posted a story on March 4th explaining how the unemployment numbers have gone down even through more people are unemployed. It has to do with changes made in the way the numbers are calculated, and with a number called the 'labor force participation rate.' Please follow the link above--there are a number of graphs that illustrate what is happening.
The key paragraphs from the article:
"How can the unemployment rate decrease so dramatically when not enough jobs were added to even cover population growth? Because the people the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) counts dramatically decreased, they didn't disappear, but are re-categorized as not in the labor force.
"The civilian labor force increased by +147,000. Of those still in the civilian labor force, employed, increased by 250,000 in February, yet those unemployed dropped by -190,000. Those not in the labor force increased by +87,000 in a month. What we see here are people simply dropping out of the count and less people entered the labor force...looking for work, officially.
"The civilian non-institutional population are those 16 years or older not locked up somewhere or not in the military or so sick and disabled they are in a nursing home and so on.
"The civilian non-institutional population rose by 147,000 last month. The civilian population now stands at 238,851,000. Not in the labor force are those of the civilian non-institutional population who are not counted as looking for work or having a job. Yet those not in the labor force stands as a horrifying 85,605,000, or 36% of the non-institutional civilian population. An equally horrific 13,673,000 people of the official tally are out looking for work."
That is how you make the unemployment number go down while the same number (or more) of people are unemployed.
This is one of the charts in the article. Notice that recent recessions were much longer under Democrat administrations.
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