A good statistician can make numbers say anything he wants them to say. The people currently working for the government are not good statisticians–they are great statisticians! We have all been told that the unemployment rate for Americans has dropped to 4.9 percent. Wow! That is wonderful. But wait a minute–let’s look a little more closely.

The Washington Free Beacon posted a story today about the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their reporter does a good job of putting the numbers in context.

The article reports:

There were 94,609,000 Americans not participating in the labor force in October, an increase of 425,000 people from the previous month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

The bureau counts those not in the labor force as people who do not have a job and did not actively seek one in the past four weeks.

The labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the population that has a job or actively looked for one in the past month, declined from 62.9 percent in September to 62.8 percent in October.

The unemployment rate for all Americans declined to 4.9 percent from 5.0 percent in the previous month. This measure does not account for those individuals who have dropped out of the labor force and simply measures the percent of those who did not have a job but actively sought one over the month.

The economic recovery under President Obama has been very weak.

The article concludes:

“This so-called-recovery has been extremely weak,” said National Federation of Independent Business president Juanita Duggan. “Small business, which represents 99.7 percent of all U.S. employers and employs 58 million Americans, is the engine of job creation. Until small business owners have a clearer sense of what the future will bring, they’ll keep their foot on the brakes.”

“Small business owners are paralyzed by uncertainty,” she said. “The combination of record uncertainty, rising labor costs, and a shortage of qualified workers is depressing small business job creation.”

This is America under President Obama. President Hillary Clinton will bring more of the same. I would like to note that the people cramming Common Core down our throats are not helping the shortage of qualified workers. Standardized test scores of American students under Common Core have gone down–not up. It is time to clean the swamp in Washington and begin again.