Friday, July 3, 2015

The real reason the unemployment rate ‘fell’ in June 2015

New York Post ^ | 07/03/2015 | John Crudelle 

You’ve probably heard this phrase: “There are lies, damned lies and there are statistics.”
Let’s look at the latest statistics from the Labor Department and you decide whether we are being told the truth, lied to or simply misled by faulty numbers.
On Thursday, Labor, in the first sentence of its June jobs report statement, said that “payroll employment increased by 223,000 and the unemployment rate declined to 5.3 percent.
Thanks, but I’d like to focus instead on the fifth paragraph and the very last paragraph. First, the unemployment rate.
It was down from 5.5 percent in May, so instinctively people would say “hooray” and move on.
But the real story is in the aforementioned paragraph five. There, Labor tells us the labor force participation rate declined by 0.3 percentage points, or by 432,000 people, to 62.6 percent in June.
That means just 62.6 percent of those eligible to work have a job or are looking for work. And that is a 37-year low.
And that is why the unemployment rate fell — not because folks are getting jobs.
The government’s 5.3 percent rate doesn’t take into account people who aren’t looking for jobs because they don’t think any exist. Discouraged workers, like the ones I just described, don’t count as being unemployed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ..

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