RUSH: On Fox America’s Newsroom today, Bill Hemmer interviewed the chairman of Gallup, the CEO, Jim Clifton. He wrote an op-ed a couple of days ago, and for many of you in this audience it wasn’t news. He had simply just discovered the difference in the U-3 and the U-6 unemployment designations, and he had just discovered that the 5.7% unemployment rate did not get anywhere near presenting the accurate picture of unemployment in America.

He discovered there was something called U-6.

Really!

The CEO of Gallup figured out that there’s a whole lot of people that are not working and have given up working who are not counted as unemployed, and he couldn’t believe that. So he wrote a piece about how we’re being lied to, that the unemployment picture in this country is far worse, and he didn’t understand why the news media isn’t digging deeper to tell the story. So he wrote the op-ed. Well, now he’s digging even deeper. He’s doubling down on all of this with even more data and stats that he has learned.

Bill Hemmer said to Jim Clifton, “Tell me about the big lie,” which is what he wrote in his op-ed, how he titled it. “What is the big lie, Jim?”

CLIFTON: If I could do it over again, Bill, I might call it “very misleading.” But the point is that number is getting so messy, it might be the most important metric in the United States of America and the world, how many people are working. It mixes part-time and full-time. And of course, what everybody wants, the great American dream is to have a good job, not a crappy job.

RUSH: Right, that’s true, everybody wants… Not just jobs. People want careers. You want a job that is part of a career. People choose careers, objectives in a career. They want to become something. Some people don’t. They just want a job to do something; that’s fine. But his point here is that inclusive in the definition of the American dream is a good job. Whenever you want one, it’s there. It’s the promise of America. You want to work? There’s a golden opportunity.

You want to set the world on fire, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to whatever? There’s an opportunity for this in this country. And that’s where he’s going. The opportunity isn’t there. It clearly isn’t there anymore. The number of people working full time is dwindling, the number of people working part time is rapidly increasing, and you don’t build careers working part time. Bill Hemmer then said, “Well, you write that the big lie,” and, by the way, he’s walking back that term. He’s now calling is “the big mislead.” But Hemmer said, “You write that the big lie has consequences. What are the consequences of this, Jim?”

CLIFTON: The number of full-time jobs — and that’s what everybody wants — as a percent of the total population is the lowest it’s ever been. That’s what that number doesn’t show. The more people that drop out, the better the number gets. We might add 250,000 jobs. What reporters — or what the administration or Wall Street — doesn’t ask next is, “Well, how many people dropped out?” Well, that number might be 500,000. It actually makes the unemployment number better when those people drop out.

HEMMER: Right.

CLIFTON: You’ll hear both Wall Street and the administration say that we’ve had more success with unemployment than we’ve had in 10 years. That’s just absolutely not true.

RUSH: Right. Now, I’m grateful for this — I am happy Jim Clifton has shown up — but, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you and I have been discussing on this program for practically five years, maybe even… Ah, five years. Obama’s starting his seventh year now, so five years we’ve been talking about the fraudulent reporting of unemployment. I remember into arguments with people.

I would say, “One of the ways to get the unemployment rate down, that percentage rate down, is to reduce the overall universe of jobs,” and that’s what’s happened. With the number of jobs that have been lost, that just simply don’t exist anymore — companies that have closed down, or companies have eliminated jobs — the opportunity to get jobs is way down. The number of jobs down is in the millions. Well, okay. If there are fewer jobs to have, then, by definition, the unemployment rate percentage is gonna drop.

And then if you further do not count all the people who’ve been out of work for four years or more and are now not looking for work, the unemployment rate’s gonna drop even more. That’s his point. The worse the news got in reality, the better the unemployment rate got. I remember… For those of you who have been lifers, been listening regularly here for the longest time, you know that every month when these numbers are released, we went through them.

We made exactly this point time and time again. I remember getting into arguments. I have friends in high finance who’d send me e-mails, “Rush, you’re not talking about this right! Just because you reduce the overall number of jobs it has nothing to do with the unemployment rate.” I would get mad and I’d write ’em back, “How can it not? The unemployment rate is an expression of how many jobs there are in the country, and how many people don’t have them.

“Well, if the universe of jobs declines, if there are fewer jobs to have, well, then the people out of work percentage is gonna also fall, and it’s not gonna be representative of the truth.” Now, Mr. Clifton, I don’t know how or when, but he has arrived at this. He’s understood it. I’m happy as heck that he is now writing about it, going on TV and talking about it, because the more people who understand it, the better, because it’s necessary to put the lie to what Obama’s saying.

Obama’s out there touting this roaring economy now. He’s out there really highlighting this roaring recovery and this fast-growing economy, and saying, “We finally put it all back together!” It’s worse than ever. By the time you add Obamacare into this, and the number of people who are losing full-time jobs and being converted to part time and losing Obamacare or health care in the process or just giving up?

Folks, there’s no way the productivity of this country can in any way maintain what it’s been, particularly when the government comes in and takes over more and more chunks of the private sector or the free-market economy. When government grows, how can it grow? It has to gobble something. Government growing is the exact opposite of what we want when we talk about a strong American economy. The government is not part of that.

Government destroys wealth, government creates debt. Government doesn’t produce anything. The bigger government gets definition, the smaller the free market economy is getting. The free-market economy’s where we live. The free market economy is where our lifestyles are. The free market economy is where our standard of living is. The free market economy is where everybody’s opportunity is. The free market economy is the pie that everybody wants a piece of.

Now, normally in a growth economy with as little overregulation as possible and the government getting out of the way, that pie grows, and feeds off itself. The growth contributes to growth, and that’s how you create even more opportunity for an even greater number of people graduating from school every year and entering the workforce. But that cannot happen when somebody like Obama’s running the show because he’s eating up the free market economy.

He’s gobbling it up and swallowing it up and government’s getting bigger, and there’s no way your piece of the pie can get bigger, and there’s no way the pie itself can get bigger, and therefore there’s no way opportunity can expand. That’s another reason why we’re gonna have a wealth gap because in a shrinking pie, you know what else happens? The real cream of the crop are gonna take an even bigger piece of it.

The smartest among us, the hardest working among us, the most creative among us — the luckiest among us, in some cases — when the pie gets smaller, the rich don’t get dumber. When the pie gets smaller, the really creative, the entrepreneurs, don’t also get smaller and dumber. They stay the same size, and we’re creating more of those as they’re born. So the smaller the pie gets, the greater percentage of it’s gonna be gobbled up by the truly competent, the hardworking, the industrious.

I don’t mean this as an insult to anybody.

It’s just human nature.

The bigger the pie, the more that is gonna be left over for others who don’t want to work as hard, who don’t invest as much in themselves as others do, but that’s always been the great thing about America. That pie was always growing. That free market economy, that place where your security is, where your economic opportunity is, where your lifestyle is, where your standard of living is. That’s the US economy. As long as it’s growing, everybody’s got a shot at a bigger piece of pie.

If it’s shrinking, the pie is gonna be cut up in much different ways, and an increasing amount of that pie is gonna be taken by the, quote/unquote “wealthy,” and the gap is gonna get bigger. And then when the government gets bigger by printing money, and prints all that money and gives it the stock market, the wealth gap’s gonna expand even more. In the midst of all this, the Regime is coming along and talking about how great the economy is.

“It’s roaring and growing, and look at the unemployment! We’ve got better employment situation than we have in ten years!” It’s an out-and-out lie. We have 93 million Americans not working. That’s the labor force participation rate. It hasn’t been this high since World War II. It’s really bad out there, and this guy finally has shown up on the scene to write about it in his own way, and he will persuade others who didn’t know it, or are not aware of it.

One more sound bite. Bill Hemmer with a final question: “We hear this a lot from the colleagues over at Fox Business, and Stuart Varney has been talking about this for years now. It leads to the next question. That is: What are the political leaders doing that have a direct impact on this, Jim? What are they doing to correct this, if the middle class is being hollowed out?”

CLIFTON: New business startups is the lowest it’s been in like 20 years or ever. America’s not started businesses anymore. We need about 500,000 new businesses to start while 400,000 die. Four years ago, those lines crossed. So now we’re in very dangerous waters.

HEMMER: Right.

CLIFTON: But those full-time unemployment jobs will never come back until free enterprise and the spirit of entrepreneur kicks back in.

RUSH: So we used to be a net creator of businesses. We’d create 500,000 and 400,000 would fail, but still we’d have a 100,000 new ones. Now it’s the opposite. Create 500,000 and 600,000 are failing. All the new ones fail, and then the existing ones join them. That’s his point what’s happening now. The bottom line is, the Regime is lying through their teeth about this economy, and that does a disservice as well. Because it actually can lead to people not being as inspired. They think they’re gonna get swept up in it and it’s gonna take care of them by inertia or whatever.

It’s a mess, folks.