IBD: Unemployment Rate is Meaningless

"[I]n the upside-down world of Obamanomics, the jobless figure is increasingly useless, hiding more than it reveals," writes Investor's Business Daily, noting that April's "official" reported unemployment rate was 8.1%.

 Had the participation rate stayed where it was in June 2009 — the month the recession officially ended — the unemployment rate would be more like 11% today. And when you add in all those who can't get full-time work because of the lousy job market, the jobless rate reaches Depression-era levels of 14.5% — unchanged, by the way, from the month before.

Nor does the unemployment number adequately capture the many other ways the job market has deteriorated on Obama's watch. There are, for example, 5.1 million people who've been out of work for 27 weeks or more — nearly double the number when Obama took office. The median length of unemployment is now 19.4 weeks — also nearly double from what it was in January 2009.

Obama has, in other words, managed to give a whole new meaning to the term "jobless recovery," one that the traditional unemployment measure simply isn't able to capture.

 Recent college grads aren't finding jobs either, according to the New York Times.