White House hides the big drop in percentage of working Americans

It's not the same as the unemployment rate. It is the workplace participation rate that shows the true horror of Obama's jobless "recovery."

Quite simply, the percentage of working-age Americans who have a job is crashing. Daily Caller:

A new chart produced by the Republican Study Committee shows the downward jumps of that job-participation rate, even after President Barack Obama deployed his trillion-dollar stimulus in February 2009, and after Obama declared the summer of 2010 a "Recovery Summer."

"I expect you will be seeing this chart on the House floor during debates, it will be shown at town hall meetings and in district events," committee spokesman Brian Straessle told The Daily Caller.

Amid the optimistic text in today's economic report, the detailed tables reveal a sharp statistical decline.In 2000, 64.4 percent of working-age Americans had formal jobs, either full-time or part-time, according to Table B-35 on page 361. That was the measure's high water mark.

The ratio drifted down to 63.0 percent in 2007 before hitting the skids in the 2008 recession that was largely caused by federal real-estate policies.

By October 2009, five months after the recession technically ended, the ratio hit bottom at 58.5 percent, where it remained two years later in December 2011.

Given the nation's working-age population of 240.5 million, that 4.5 percent drop means that roughly 11 million Americans have fallen out of the workforce. They are excluded, however, from the nation's formal unemployment rolls - which document only 13.75 million unemployed Americans.

By excluding those non-working Americans, the White House can claim that the formal unemployment rate has fallen to 8.3 percent in January 2012, down from a peak of 10 percent in 2009.

Some of those 11 million workers not being counted retired early or have started their own businesses. The real number of jobless Americans is hidden by the BLS number which only counts those actively looking for work who are unemployed. There are at least another 5 million workers who are too discouraged to look for work as well, bringing the actual unemployment rate to over 17% - not counting part time or underemployed workers.

Will the American people be snowed by the White House rosey take on unemployment? They will manipulate this figure so that by the time of the election, they will claim massive increases when the real numbers tell a different story.