President Obama’s convention speech last night never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.
There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.
In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.
