The Patriot Post® · Dismal December Jobs Report

Economists predicted that December would see nearly 200,000 new jobs, but reality was … unexpected. Just 74,000 jobs were created last month. The headline unemployment rate dropped from 7.0% to 6.7%, but – and it’s a big but – this was almost entirely attributable to the 347,000 people who left the workforce. Just 62.8% of Americans were part of the labor force, tied for the lowest rate since 1978, and nearly 92 million people aren’t in the labor force. For the year, unemployment dropped 1.2 percentage points, but real unemployment is at least 13.1% and, again, we’d point to the 2.9 million Americans who left the labor force in 2013 as the reason. By the way, we’re entering year six of the Obama “recovery.”