Ominous News: Unemployment Rate Drops To 9%

Okay, so the jobless report for January is out, and the results are, to say the least, ominous. Why? Because the rate dropped to 9% in January.

The unemployment rate was 9.8% in November, dropped to 9.4% in December, and again to 9.0% in January. Already you hear Democrats talking about how it's a good thing... Eric Cantor says the economy is "moving in the right direction."

But is it? Analysts expected January to show a net 130,000 or so jobs created; in reality, January saw only 36,000 jobs created, FAR below the number needed to maintain the unemployment rate where it is. So why did the rate DROP?

For the second month in a row, the workforce shrunk by a huge amount. In December it dropped by 600,000 or so, and in January it dropped by 500,000 or so. Think about that... in only two months, more than a MILLION people have decided to stop looking for work! That's so far from being a good thing that it's ridiculous. If the trend continues, the rate will drop to nothing and nobody will be working.

Here's the report for January.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

I cried foul last month, and I do so again this month.


Look, for two straight months more than half a million people have left the workforce. This coincides with the Democrats' desire to score something big on the economy after their drastic loss in November. I see two options here, one bad and the other worse.

The first option is that the figures are accurate, and an additional million people gave up and stopped looking for work. That's a chilling figure, and it is definitely NOT the way we want to lower the unemployment rate. Think about it... at this rate, we could lower the unemployment rate to 4% by convincing another 7 million people that it's useless to look for work! Sound like a solid economic base to you? Me neither... I'd rather we lowered the rate by ADDING JOBS rather than by SHEDDING WORKERS.

The second option is that the Obama administration is "cooking the books" by exaggerating the number of people who drop from the workforce in order to artificially lower the unemployment rate. Keep in mind, this dramatic drop in the workforce started in December... immediately AFTER the Democrats suffered their huge electoral "shellacking." If they are doing this, it's more than despicable, it's sinister. One of the underlying assumptions of this data is that political concerns don't change the facts; if the White House has disregarded this and is changing the data to make themselves look better... Well.

As I said, the second option is worse than the first. It's bad enough that Democrats are ignoring 1.1 million people who gave up on getting a job to celebrate a 9% unemployment rate! And in only TWO MONTHS!

Make no mistakes, the last two job reports are NOT hopeful for those who want this economy to recover. The combination of few jobs being created and MANY people leaving the job market can ONLY be bad for our economy. Far from being encouraged by a 0.8% drop in the unemployment rate over the past two months, I'm depressed by the implications.