Money McBags over at Zero Hedge lets us know where it really is (a bit of a language warning if you decide to check out the entire article):
…if the labor force participation rate had just been at 64.5% like it was 3 months ago and thus 812k more people had been in the labor force, the unemployment rate would have been 9.5%. If the labor force participation rate had been at its ten year average of 66%, ~4.4MM more people would have been labeled as unemployed in the labor force and thus the unemployment rate would have been 11.8%…
And what was the unemployment rate three months ago? 9.4%. In other words, there has been no improvement in the employment picture…just a bit of playing around with the numbers until it comes out as good news for Obama. We can expect this sort of thing to continue – Democrats seem to believe that if unemployment drops below 8% then the economy ceases to be a negative for Obama’s re-election effort. And, so, the data will be massaged as far as possible without becoming laughably out of relation to truth.
Trouble with this plan, however, is that gasoline and food prices are spiking and that will drag down the economy – unemployment will start to rise again. Massaged data or no, I don’t think Obama will get below his magic number before November of 2012.
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