It's all about the destruction...
...sure wish our side (do we have a side?) would fight fire with overwhelming firepower...
::unknowncomic::
Among those they have not fooled, of course, is de facto Tea Party father Rick Santelli of CNBC. "I don't trust [these numbers]," said Santelli Friday on Squawk Box at the very moment the figures were released. "I want to see the labor force participation rate because personally I don't trust the U3 rate...and when you throw in the politics of the day -- because this is such a big number that resonates with the public -- there's a lot of movement in these numbers that can alter the rate significantly."
Santelli's initial instincts, of course, were right on the money. The participation rate had been jiggered to make Obama look good. Or, since it's 8.6, make him look less bad. And yes, "the politics of the day," as Santelli said, is the entire reason.
Even Santelli's regular antagonist on CNBC, liberal economist Steve Liesman, admitted that this was the case -- albeit in gentler terms: "The workforce declined by 315 thousand and that makes it easier to get to the lower unemployment rate." Uh, ya think? Now, just where the hell did those 315 thousand people go? They have given up hope, so the administration is just pretending that they aren't there anymore.
Actually, it's worse than that. A closer look at the figures shows that some 435 thousand non-working adults have been statistically vaporized, while the newly employed 125 thousand folks are counted, equaling the net loss of adult workers of over 300 thousand.
Translation: the administration lied to us to make itself look good. That big Obama supporter Steve Liesman is admitting this on an NBC network is significant.
Which is why I believe this cooking of the books may be reaching a critical mass of ineffectiveness. Taking the work of Pethokoukis into account, the workforce is now officially only 64% of all adults -- which means that something on the order of only 55% of adults are now working. (This should be the permanent metric, and not some esoteric U3 number, anyway, but that's another article). This is not sustainable or healthy.
And while most folks don't realize that only 55% of adults are working, they know something is wrong. And they know a lot of those other 45%. And many are obviously in that 45%, and they know that many are not legitimately retired or legitimately disabled.
Rick Santelli