March's Employment Report Finally Exposes Obama's Poor Job Creation Record

In the latest employment summary, it was reported that 192,000 jobs were created in March.  Additionally, the jobs numbers of both January and February were revised upwards to 144,000 and 197,000; respectively.   So, in three months 533,000 jobs were added to the economy. Yet, the unemployment rate actually went up from from 6.6% to 6.7%.  This simple contradiction exposes a clear flaw in how we measure unemployment as a nation and how Obama has benefited from it and has been able to make the claim of 49 consecutive months of job creation.

For over 4 years, the Obama Administration -- not the country -- has benefited from the fact that millions of able-bodied unemployed workers have just stopped looking for work out of sheer frustration.  Quite simply, when a job seeker gives up, our government no longer considers them part of the unemployed or part of the workforce.  Thus it appears there is job creation and a lowering of the rate of unemployment when there really wasn't.  Proof of this comes from the fact that, from January through March, the number of unemployed workers rose from 10.236 million to 10.486 million.  This was despite a supposed job creation of over half a million jobs. Logically, you can't have job creation when job losses are increasing.  Thus the flaw in our system of measuring this important number.

The reality is that we still have record numbers of sidelined workers who have given up; and, that is the only reason why Obama's job creation record, is as good as it is.  But, if one looks at the U6 accounting of the unemployment rate, which doesn't exclude those no longer job hunting, we have an unemployment rate that is still at 12.7%; well above the officially high rate of 10% in 2010.  The simple fact is that, for every job Obama says he created, two unemployed workers just gave up looking for work.

References:

March Employment Situation Summary: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

March Household Survey Data:  http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm

March Alternative Measures Of Labor Utilization (U1 through U6): http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

49 Consecutive Months Of Private Sector Job Growth: http://www.dpcc.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=172