RUSH: “A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims. Should the government measure unemployment with Hunter’s figure, the unemployment rate would be” anywhere from 9.8% to 10.2%. If you would count the people who are not working, who’ve given up working — those people are not counted now. By the time you take the labor force participation rate into this and the number of jobs that they say just don’t exist anymore…

The unemployment rate that’s reported as 8.2% is fraudulent. It is not accurate. It doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening in the country. It has been manufactured specifically to cushion the news during an election year. The unemployment rate in this country is actually much worse, and it’s all part of the same plan. You’ve got $3- to $4-a-gallon gasoline. In some places, it’s higher. You have accompanying news stories, “Uh, not a big deal anymore. People have learned to adjust. Eh, there’s a lot of complacency with it. People understand now.” Well, by the same token, “There’s 8.2% unemployment? Eh, it’s kind of like 5% used to be. It’s about as good as we can do. It’s not that bad, folks.”

There’s a massive move on to try to make the literally devastating realities of this economy seem like no big deal. The media is working with the White House; the government is publishing phony data. If you put it on a chart… You know, charts are impossible to explain chart data to radio. I can hold the chart up here to the Dittocam, but it’s a waste of time. And I could put the chart maybe up on Facebook or at RushLimbaugh.com. I could do that, and I might, the chart I’m referring to here. But it’s very difficult to translate chart data to radio. But the fact of the matter is that what Duncan Hunter is talking about here is the difference in the U3 versus the U6 number. U3 is what’s reported. That’s the 8.2% number, and that does not include people who have given up looking for jobs after four years. They’re still out there. They’re not working, but they’re not looking. So they aren’t, according to current tabulation techniques, counted as unemployed. ‘Cause they’re not looking for a job.