Recovery?

[Ibby]

MSNBC regularly - VERY regularly - talks about how the unemployment numbers hide the true rate because it only counts - and has historically only counted - those SEEKING employment. That's what labor force means. You can't measure a "desire" to be employed the way you can measure those TRYING to work. When Steve Liesman says "The workforce declined by 315 thousand and that makes it easier to get to the lower unemployment rate," Obama didn't "decide" to not count the 435,000 people who have given up looking for work - they GAVE UP LOOKING. Maybe you can argue that Obama CAUSED them to give up, but the DEFINITION of U3 unemployment hasn't changed. Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr... I don't know when we started measuring unemployment using this system, but U3 has meant the same thing. If you can show me that the U3 numbers used by Bush DIDN'T discount people who took themselves out of the labor force (as the article you linked to ADMITS: "And when it becomes "good news" to an administration that 315 thousand fewer adults even consider themselves in the workforce anymore..."), you might have a case, Merc.

I agree that the statistic is misleading, but it's just as misleading as ever as it was.

And caps don't mean I'm yelling, they mean I'm too lazy to use italics or anything.