According to the most recent Labor Department statistics, more than 257,000 new jobs were created in the month of January, a sign perhaps that the alleged American comeback story is real.
But Gallup’s CEO Jim Clifton, in a hard-hitting blog this week, has detailed what many analysts on the right have been saying for years: the federal government is cooking the books on employment numbers.
President Obama hailed in his SOTU address the administration’s success in reducing national unemployment numbers to 5.6%, which represents a low point since the Great Recession. The problem, Clifton points out, is that it’s a lie that explicitly does not include the numbers of Americans who have either dropped off the unemployment rolls or have stopped looking for work altogether. He quips:
“There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”
He details that the real number of unemployed Americans stands as high as nearly 10% of the current U.S. population. And when we consider the roughly 30 million among those either unemployed or under-employment as a percent only of working-age adults, that number skyrockets.
