It happened again on Friday. Two pieces of news that don’t seem possible to square with one another. On the one hand, the U-3 unemployment rate declined to 4.9 percent, which sounds like wonderful news! On the other hand, the economy only created 151,000 new jobs, which is not even enough to keep up with population growth.
So how can this be? We’ve dealt with this many times before, of course, but since the lamestream media never catch on we’ll have to keep doing it. The U-3 unemployment rate doesn’t consider the underemployed or those who have left the workforce. So as far as this measure is concerned, if you give up looking for work, you don’t even exist.
