A Simple Tweet Says It All About Today's Unemployment Report

This morning, a simple and concise tweet by financial columnist, James Pethokoukis, cut through all the media enthusiasm over this morning's unemployment number. His tweet was as follows: "10.9%: The unemployment rate (U-3) if the size of US workforce was the same as when Obama took office, not 8.5%". He's right. In essence, he's saying that the unemployment rate is a deceptive number because it doesn't include all those people who stopped looking for work because there are no jobs to find.

But, to me, Jim's tweet stops short of another fact. His tweet doesn't include the workers who should have been added to the workforce due to population growth over the last three years. That's another 5.6 million workers who aren't being counted in either the Bureau of Labor and Statistics report or in Jim's calculation. That's why many believe the true unemployment rate is actually above 20%. Of course, a true reporting of the actual unemployment rate would be political suicide for both Obama and the Democrats.