Republicans quickly pounced on the last unemployment report before the election as the White House once again said the rate, which ticked up from 7.8 percent in September to 7.9 percent last month, shows the need to keep President Obama’s policies.
Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said private sector businesses added 184,000 jobs last month, the biggest monthly gain in eight months.
He said the jump in unemployment was largely due to more people entering the work force. “The labor force rose by 578,000 people in October, and the labor force participation rate increased by 0.2 percentage point. The share of the population employed rose by 0.1 percentage point to 58.8 percent,” Krueger wrote in a statement this morning. “Over the last 12 months, the unemployment rate has decreased by 1.0 percentage point, as a result of growing employment.”
“Today brought more disappointing economic news for the American people,” said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. “After trillions wasted on failed stimulus projects, a takeover of our health care system and preferential industry bailouts, all President Obama has to show for it is $16 trillion in national debt, $5.5 trillion of which came from just four years of his failed leadership. At this point, the American people are no longer surprised by the failure of the president’s policies. They are disappointed and fed up.”
Krueger added that “to create more jobs in particularly hard-hit sectors, President Obama continues to urge Congress to pass elements of the American Jobs Act, including further investment in infrastructure to rebuild our Nation’s ports, roads and highways, and assistance to State and local governments to prevent layoffs and to enable them to rehire hundreds of thousands of teachers.”
“Although our nation’s economic growth is far too slow and our unemployment rate is far too high, President Obama believes we should continue the same failed policies and raise taxes on American families and small businesses,” said Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“Four years of persistently high unemployment and long-term joblessness might be the best President Obama can do – but it’s nowhere near what the American people can do if we get Washington out of their way,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
“We’ve also begun the process of fixing our tax code to help bring jobs home. Now all we need is a partner in the White House who will lead the way on removing barriers to robust job growth – not create new barriers,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who has been campaigning intensely for Mitt Romney.
Isn’t it funny how every time the unemployment number drops due to people leaving the workforce, the democrats spin it as only the raw unemployment number that matters, who cares how it got there. Now when the reverse happens they’re the first to point out the contribution the changing size of the workforce makes. The media’s letting them have their cake and eat it too, someone needs to release a running graph of unemployment numbers normalized for Jan 2009 workforce size. Bet it don’t look too good for the dems.
In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell reminded us that you can make any fraction you like by putting a numerator on top and a denominator on the bottom, but that no power on Earth can make it mean anything — including whatever you might want it to mean. The unemployment-rate, as the BLS calculates it, is such a fraction: meaningless apart from additional information about how many persons are working and how many persons are seeking work (and can’t get it).
Sowell also remarked that “You can always make A exceed B, if you leave out enough of B and exaggerate A.” Something to bear in mind when confronted by any statistic! And always remember:
The easiest way to shoot down a liberal on unemployment when they spin, swirl, twirl, twist, whirl, rotate, revolve, gyrate, massage, juggle, jumble, slice, dice, splice & parse the numbers is to say:
“There has not been one single day of Obama’s Presidency when more people were working in America than the day when George W. Bush left office. Not one.”
Unemployment rate went up because more people want to work….And that is good news how for the administration? The jobs still aren’t there.
Yeah, CLM, I’m scratching my head on that one, too. “Hey looky! More people want to work, but can’t! See how good we’re doing?”
I guess to this White House, it’s not their fault and bad that more people want to work. “Shame on you for wanting to get a job!” And it’s apparently good when more people want to be dependent on government and draw a check. That’s the only logic I can extract out of it.
– the holiday season.