Nice Job Barry: Unemployment Down One-Half a Percent in Four and a Half Years

Way to go, dude:

(CNSNews.com) – Over the last 56 months – since Barack Obama became president in January 2009 --unemployment has dropped 0.5%, from a rate of 7.8% in January 2009 down to 7.3% in August 2013, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

During those 56 months, the unemployment rate rose substantially to a high of 10% in October 2009 and stayed in the high 9% range for 2010 and much of 2011. In January 2012, the unemployment rate was 8.3%. It crept down to 7.8% in December 2012, exactly what it was when Obama was inaugurated (and George W. Bush left office).
That rate has stayed in the mid-7% range so far in 2013 and is at 7.3% for August, according to the BLS data.
The unemployment rate has not fallen below 7.3% in the last 5-plus years.
The seasonally adjusted BLS data, released today, is for all U.S. workers ages 16 and older.

What has Barry told us? He'll work night and day or some such BS until the unemployment rate gets below seven percent. First of all, a consistent unemployment rate of 7% is piss-poor -- nothing to strive for. Secondly, this is the worst unemployment record for a president -- ever in terms of of a consistently poor unemployment rate. The next worst occurred during the next worst president's term -- James Earl Carter Jr. Clinton's low unemployment rate over eight years was a function of the tremendous economic juggernaut created by the Reagan Revolution that preceded his two terms -- the longest sustained period of peace and prosperity in the modern era. And with Reagan's economic policies -- the exact opposite of what Barack the Terrible's  policies are -- unemployment did the exact opposite. Yes, that's correct, it didn't go up, come back down and stagnate at an unacceptably high level. Once Reagan's economic policies kicked in, unemployment dropped steadily through the second half of his first term and all of his second term. That's a fact. For the ignorant among us, I won't bother to do your work for you. It would do you some good to take the initiative to educate yourselves by looking it up.

I can hear the lefties out there now: The Reagan Era was a completely different era -- you can't replicate what Reagan did today. Funny you should say that because Reagan didn't invent it, he just perfected it: John F. Kennedy did in the early sixties. GW Bush replicated it again in the first decade of this century.

I will grant you that things are different now however, in this one respect: Economic measurements and economic reporting are slanted with a bias towards the president's piss-poor economic policies. You see, these days we don't count Americans who gave up looking for work in the reported unemployment figure. So when you hear that 169,000 jobs were created last month what you don't hear is that hundreds of thousand of people dropped out of the workforce and are no longer being counted on the rolls. The "workforce participation rate" -- the number of Americans actively looking for work -- is at its lowest level since the administration of the last worst president, Jimmy Carter, in 1978. If you count all the folks that have stopped looking for work, the actual unemployment rate is nearly double what is being reported.

Those of you who pay attention may also wonder why your hear month after month that inflation is minimal but when you go to the store, food prices are shooting through the roof. ($18.99 a pound yesterday for premium New York Strip steak and have you seen the price of a simple sack of potatoes lately?). And have you been to the gas pump lately? We're being led to believe that we should consider ourselves lucky to pay $3.50 for a gallon of gas when gas was about half that when GW left office. Well, surprise folks: Since Barry the Terrible has been president, we haven't counted food and energy prices -- two things everyone spends a large amount of their income on -- in the inflation figures. Think about how food prices go up every time you go to the store and think about what the real inflation rate is.

Unemployment sucks, inflation is horrible. In fact, every economic measurement sucks and nearly all are as bad or worse than they were during the Carter era. The government is just "cooking the books" by misreporting economic statistics and masking real inflation by propping up the economy by printing worthless money (actually, they don't even print it any more, they just electronically produce it out of thin air). But rest assured, Barry the Fool is working tirelessly on .... improving his golf score which must not be very good because they don't report that. They don't even lie about it so it must be really bad.