Another month, another Obama fail. For the second month in a row, the monthly jobs numbers came in much lower than expected. Yet, again, with the Obama BLS fudging the numbers, the unemployment still managed to drop to 6.6%, despite only 113,000 jobs being added. That number doesn’t even keep up with population growth, let alone new entrants into the job market. But facts don’t matter as the Obama regime tries to do whatever it can to save Democrat’s asses in the 2014 midterms.
The BLS applied its annual revisions to benchmarks, which in the end didn’t change too much of its analyses over the past year. The impact to the December-January calculations was almost nil, for instance.
There are a couple of bright spots. The U-6 measure of overall unemployment dropped to 12.7% even with the increase in the labor force, its lowest reading since December 2008 near the apex of the job-loss meltdown in the Great Recession. The number of people employed in the Establishment survey hit its highest level since June 2008, and in the private-sector since March 2008. The workforce participation rate bounced back a little, but not much; 63.0% is still tied for the fifth-lowest month since the 1970s.
Still, we need to add 150,000 jobs a month to keep pace with population growth. We’re closer to it than in December, which was upgraded to 75,000 jobs added, but still far off the pace for even stagnation.