RUSH: Here’s Christine Romans, it’s on CNN newsroom this morning with Carol Costello. The combined IQ here is probably that of a pencil eraser. They are discussing the new unemployment numbers, and here’s what there is to know.
ROMANS: The unemployment rate ticked up, and 5.5% is the unemployment rate now, but it ticked up, Carol, for all the right reasons. It ticked up because 397,000 people in the month came into the labor market. They hadn’t been looking for a job in the months before that, and they decided that they were gonna try their hand at it, so that’s why the unemployment rate ticked up for the right reasons. If you want to go out there and start looking for a job, this is a good time to be looking for a job. Wages are increasing. We saw those in this number. That’s very important.
RUSH: See, it’s a great time to go looking for a job, why, because all kinds of new people are looking for a job, which means there’s more competition to find a job, and wages are supposedly going up. So the unemployment rate went up for all the right reasons. Now, I know the point that she’s trying to make here. We had some people who were on the beach now admitting that they’re looking for jobs so they get counted at unemployment, but since they’re now looking for jobs rather than, you know, sitting home watching E! Entertainment TV, that’s good, but it’s just a illustration again, bad news turns into good news when it’s about Democrats.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, even with all the so-called great economic news today, the job numbers, don’t forget the way CNN’s reporting ’em. Yep. The Unemployment rate went up from 5.4 to 5.5% for the right reasons. Yeeees. The unemployment rate went up for the right reasons. In spite of all this, there remain 93 million Americans not working. Ninety-three million! The adult population the country is 240 million total. It’s 300 million, maybe 240 million adults or 220 million adults, and 93 million are not working.
Can you imagine…? Now, not all of those at one point have. I mean, the labor force participation rate has never been 100%. But back in the days when there really was a growing economy and when you knew it just by being alive — just by doing your business you knew that economic expansion was taking place — you saw businesses opening. You could just feel it; you could just see it. There’s none of that today.
You don’t feel any uptick in economic activity. You don’t get a sense of it all. You see just the opposite. It only stands to reason with as much of the economy the government’s taken over. You know, one-sixth of our economy’s been taken over by Obamacare. It just stands to reason. If just 20 million of those 93 million found work, what a difference it would make. This unemployment number of 5.5% is meaningless.
Do you realize folks George W. Bush, just a year or two years before leaving office…? He left office 2009, so this is 2007. The media was doing everything they could to try to convince everybody we were in a recession. In the Iraq war they were trying to engineer a defeat. It was just… Every day was just a drumbeat of pessimism and negativity and it just was relentless. But even then we had statistically full unemployment.
As defined by the Fed Reserve and the Department of Labor, that’s always been the case. About 4.7%, 4.5% unemployment has been considered full employment. Meaning: You take the labor force participation rate and you have a traditional percentage of American adults who can work working (it’s never 100%), and then you calculate the unemployment rate by counting the number of people who’ve lost their jobs but are trying to find jobs.
When you have an unemployment rate (the U-3 number) that is 4.7%, 4.5, you’ve got statistic full employment, based on the idea that it’s never really gonna be the case that everybody who’s capable of having a job is going to have one. But we’re nowhere near 4.7% unemployment as it was when George Bush was president in 2005 or 2006. When he was at 4.7% unemployment, we had economic growth out the wazoo. There was no negative numbers. The labor force participation rate was much larger than it is today.
For them to tell us the unemployment rate is 5.5%, just one point worse than statistical full employment? That should tell you how we have simply redefined for the worse how we calculate employment and unemployment in this country. It’s absurd. The unemployment rate is more accurately reflected by what is called the U-6 number, and that number is around 11, 12%. That counts the number of people out of work who have given up trying to find a job, and that’s more like it.
You go to the African-American community, and do you know what the unemployment rate is among African-Americans? It’s in the twenties. It’s been hovering around 25%, and they want to celebrate news that 280-some-odd-thousand jobs were created? From the moment Obama did his Porkulus, we needed 500,000 jobs a month just to stay even, and a little more than 500,000 jobs a month in order to grow the economy. And we haven’t come close to 500,000 jobs in a month being created.
Not even close!
So the new normal? Everybody’s being told just to accept this is the new normal.
“This is what it is. America’s best days are behind us. We’ve gotta make do with the new reality.” That, too, is dispiriting and dressing. So it’s good to hear Rick Perry come along and some others and start speaking optimistically and positively, because it works, and people need it. Most people aren’t self-starters. People will respond to this kind of optimism and leadership, high expectations. If people know you expect a lot of them, they will start working to satisfy you. If you have low expectations of people, it’s what you’re gonna get.