Newspaper: Unemployment Rate is Really Above 11%

The official government number for the nation's unemployment rate is 9.2% but The Wall Street Journal reports today that the real U.S. unemployment rate is above 11% if you count the people who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist.

Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats have really dug us into a hole.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The share of the population in the jobs market, called the labor-force participation rate, fell to 64.1% last month — the lowest level since 1984 when women were still just beginning to enter in full force. The participation rate peaked in 2000 and has been steadily declining since as the effect of women taking full-time jobs plateaued and Baby Boomers began to retire, but the decline accelerated sharply during the recession. The participation rate was 66% at the start of the recession and 65.7% when the recovery started in June 2009. If the participation rate were still at that level, the unemployment rate would be more than 11% right now.

With nearly a third of the unemployed out of work for over a year, it makes their reintegration back into the labor market more and more difficult. People out of a job that long tend to lose skills and experience long-term effects on their lifetime earning power. It's even harder to reintegrate workers who have dropped out altogether.

There's also a problem of underemployment. A comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the "U-6" for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can't find full-time jobs. That number shot up in June to 16.2% from 15.8% a month earlier.

Read more at the newspaper's website.