The Labor Force Participation Rate shows what percentage of people are working, looking for a job and not looking for a job. It is a better yardstick to measure the workforce in America than is the usually cited "unemployment rate" which doesn't count people who are so frustrated they stopped looking for a job
The graph shows a huge upswing in labor participation through the Reagan years. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush kept the numbers up in Reagan territory. Since Obama has taken over, he has wiped out the entirety of the Reagan gains.
Zero Hedge makes the case that the real unemployment rate is not a fanciful (and still miserable) 8.1%, but a sickening 11.6%:
Reason for difference: organic growth of labor force which grows alongside the broader population. ...the widely accepted definition of the labor pool, that used by the CBO and all other government forecasting agencies, assumes a 90,000 growth in the labor force every month as it has to keep in line with the growth of the US population! The implication is simple: using a real labor force participation rate long-term average of 65.8%, the real unemployment rate in April was 11.6%, based on the 5.4 million additional workers that should be counted as part of the U-3 which then means that the real number of unemployed is not 12.5 million but 17.9 million, which in turn implies a 11.6% unemployment rate in the US. This also means that the spread between the propaganda, and the real number is now 3.5%: the most it has been since the early 1980s.
I'm not sure we can take four more months of this. Four more years....??
