This Double Dip Isn't Ice Cream

Over the past two years, since I started this blog, I have written that the only economic recovery is in the mind of those in the Obama administration. While the government spin meisters in Washington have been shouting joyous accolades over the number of jobs that the President has created, the net employment figures have worsened. You see, the government touts the figures that they can jiggle and juggle to make them appear to be heroes of the working man.

If the unemployment figure drops by one tenth of one percent the administration claims a great victory. Eighty thousand jobs created is time to declare a national holiday and to start carving Obama's face on Mount Rushmore. What they do not tell you is that when those eighty thousand jobs were created a hundred thousand were lost. What they don't tell you is that the reason the unemployment rate went down is that the people who had their unemployment benefits run out are no longer counted. To the government bean counters, these people just dropped off the face of the earth.

What the government economists do not bring up and the cuddle puppy press chooses to ignore, is the Participation Rate. That is the rate of people available for work that are employed. The current Participation Rate is 62.8 percent. In other words, one third of the people that want to work are not employed. In more other words, our real unemployment rate is 37.2 percent. Your not reading that in the New York Times.

Our administration goes ecstatic when the GDP growth rate hits 2 percent. Primarily because that is better than 1.5 percent. But 2 percent is not even enough to maintain a growing economy with a growing population. At 2 percent we are losing ground. It gets worse.

It was just announced that the current GDP growth rate is one tenth of one percent. And there is every chance that that will be adjusted downward as more figures come in. The administration usually goes for the most optimistic numbers. 

So after the longest and slowest recovery from a recession in history, we might be heading into a double dip recession. The usual definition of a recession is two negative quarters on the growth of the GDP. We seem to be going that way. As I have been shouting from the roof tops for the past two years, we are losing ground. Obamanomics is digging the hole that our country is in, deeper. 

The Obama administration talks populist but takes care of their one percenter friends. The middle class is disappearing. And not because they are upwardly mobile. Employed people were earning more twenty years ago than they are today, on the average. Whether by intent or by ineptness, our government is destroying our economy. I know that we went out there a little bit on this  one, but it is important. There is an election coming up. Use it well.