We are at the mercy of misleading statistics which nonetheless form the media narrative.

I posted earlier today about workers leaving the workforce in droves, which drives down the nominal unemployment rate and renders it a misleading statistic.  Yet the details are the details, and the headlines are the headlines.

Here are...

More news about the drop in the labor participation rate, via Zero Hedge (emphasis in original):

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%....

There is a new jobs report out, with the usual caveats that the work force is shrinking, but the nominal unemployment rate is down to 8.5%.  That’s the number which counts politically.

The rate would be 10.9% if the same number of people were in the workforce as when Obama took office

The...

The more Obama pushes class warfare, the more people reject class warfare.  That’s certainly not what I expected.

It’s the counter-indicator effect.  If he’s for it, the opposite will happen.  Perhaps he should announce an Unemployment Plan instead of a Jobs Plan.

It’s another one of those Obama paradoxes, like the Catch-2012.

From Gallup:

Americans...

There was an unemployment report released this morning which showed the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6%.

That’s a big plus for Obama, even though the drop almost entirely is the result of people leaving the workforce, as Jame Pethokoukis notes:

The mainstream media pays no attention to the underlying numbers. 8.6% is 8.6%. ...

Felix Salmon (h/t HotAir)

… I don’t see much hope that the unemployment rate will come down to a remotely acceptable level any time soon. Realistically, America’s unemployed are here to stay. And we’re only just beginning to understand how that’s going to affect the political economy of the nation.

A near permanent dependent...

There is a good reason Obama did not unveil his jobs bill prior to his jobs speech.

It’s because the jobs bill is not a jobs bill, it is the tax increase Obama has been hoping for since he was a candidate, taking $400 billion from people making $200,000 or more (couples making...

From Senator Jim DeMint, some obvious points about Obama’s complete lack of understanding of the job market (emphasis mine):

“I spent most of m life in business,’ DeMint told Glor, “and I’m hearing what the president is talking about, which are temporary incentives like giving a company 5,000 (dollars) to hire someone. It...

I have posted before about how the shrinking workforce tends to mask just how bad unemployment really is because people who have given up hope and stopped looking are not counted in the most widely cited calculation.

So the news yesterday that the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1% with zero net...

That’s how many net new jobs were created last month in newly released unemployment numbers:

The Labor Department says total payrolls were unchanged in August, weakest report in almost a year. It’s the first time since February 1945 th...

Obama is getting tough with Congress, implementing steps to have federal agencies take (supposedly) job creating actions without waiting for Congress to act, Obama Rolls Out a Jobs Plan That Doesn’t Need Congress:

On Wednesday, Obama took a now-familiar path in adopting a program–this time a jobs and infrastructure effort–that can happen...

Those are the findings of a survey of CEO’s by ChiefExecutive.net (h/t @billhobbs):

Unemployment numbers remain consistently high and CEOs are wary of future business conditions. In fact, chief executives are so pessimistic that over 66 percent expect that...

It’s hopeless with the current man at top.

Flickers of job hope quickly fade because there is a cloud hanging over the country’s economy and job growth:

The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose back
above...

Obama has a jobs plan.  He will tell us when he is ready.  Until then, just chill.

It’s early in the day, but this Tweet by Mark Knoller of CBS News already is the winner of the Obama Jobs Plan Tweet of the Day, both because it reflects that no one is buying...

There is a very interesting blog post at Political Math (via Instapundit) explaining why the attacks on Rick Perry based on Texas’ job growth will fail.

The attack on Perry, which the Axelrod/Plouffe message machine is pushing, is that Texas still has unemployment near the national average, any job growth is the result of...