The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a "four-year low" of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down?
Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that "236,000 jobs" were added to the economy in February, but what they didn't tell you was that the number of Americans "not in the labor force" rose by 296,000! And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down - by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don't want jobs. Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis.For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this "economic recovery" that they keep talking about?
At this point, the "unemployment rate" has become so meaningless that it really isn't even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.
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