Obama's Incredible Shrinking Workforce

The unemployment rate reported by the press is calculated by comparing the number of unemployed with the total number of workers actively looking for work over the past four weeks. Those discouraged workers who want a job, but are not looking for work, and those who are able to work, but have removed themselves from the labor pool by going on government assistance or going to school, are not counted in this labor pool, artificially reducing the unemployment rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers charts tracking discouraged workers:

...as well participation in the labor force as the percentage of the overall and civilian populations:

As you can see, the number of discouraged workers not actively looking for employment has soared, while the percentage of the population actually working has plunged under Obama compared with the previous 16 years of the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Our unemployment rate is actually far worse than advertised as the government simply stopped counting millions of suffering Americans.

 Hat tip to North Shore Journal for the charts.