Try Crunching these numbers!
President Obama received some good news last night. The unemployment rate has dropped to 7.8%. As Chris Mathews and others have said repeatedly, no president has been re-elected when the rate was over 8% since FDR. Market Watch has questioned whether the books have been cooked. I prefer to believe the data is accurate. After all, the government could have provided false data over the past year and apparently did not. How could the unemployment rate decline? More people stopped looking for jobs than those obtaining new jobs.
The problem is the focus of the data. The BLS trumpets the unemployment rate rather than the number of unemployed. It’s only after extensive reading did I learn about another piece of data that tells the real story. Table A-15 (Alternative measures of labor underutilization) of the BLS monthly report on Line U-6 provides a more accurate reflection of the true unemployment situation. That line provides “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.”
That number is 14.7% for this past month. At its peak in December 2010 the percentage had reached 16.6%.
The president is silent on his plans and Mitt Romney has said he will create 12 million jobs in four years. There are no details on the plans. No wonder! No one employs more help without demand. Lower taxes are wonderful for the pocket book but will that make a difference in hiring?
I don’t think so!
Coast Contact 
I wasn’t sure if you had read all the bills that were put forth to create and help people find jobs. The house went on recess without hearing the vets job bill or any other jobs bills. There were some really good bills that were never ever even heard and much less voted on. Unless you read the whole bills, you can be misled and think that the gop are right and the dems are the party not working, and then you read the whole bills and find the ‘poison amendments’ stuck in the middle of the bill(they do that hoping that all in congress won’t take the time to read the whole thing)