Opinion

Number game

TBO.com
Staff
Published: May 10, 2012

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national unemployment rate for April was 8.1 percent, down from 8.2 percent in March and 9 percent in April 2011.

At 8.1 percent, the national jobless rate is just 0.2 percentage points above the 7.9 percent unemployment rate in January 2009, when President Barack Obama entered the White House and inherited a recession that didn't end, officially at least, until June of that year.

As is usually the case, however, the employment picture was not as rosy as the jobless numbers suggest. For one thing, the economy only created 115,000 jobs in April, fewer than economists had been predicting. The private sector added 130,000, but the public sector lost 15,000.

Even worse, a good deal of the drop in the unemployment rate was the result of a decrease in the number of people in the labor market, which was down 169,000 in April, thanks in large part to people giving up looking for work. That put the percentage of Americans who either have jobs or are looking for work — what economists call the labor force participation rate — at 63.6 percent. That is the lowest that number has been since December 1981, when the nation was in recession.

In spite of disturbing statistics such as this, not much will be done to correct the job-growth problem until after this year's elections. We're worried nothing much will be done after November either.