Unemployment Farce Number of 8.3 Should Be 20%!

The following is a very good article (portion only, the rest can be read at the link I have provided) on how and why the current unemployment rate of 8.3 is a complete farce and the true unemployment rate is being completely ignored. Just in time for an election year, so as to make their candidate look much better. For even though one can change the definition of something through semantics, it doesn't mean the reality and objective truth of that thing changes along with the new defintion.
In a book titled Pilgrim's Regress, by C.S. Lewis, Lewis describes how the protaganist (John) of the story is imprisoned by a giant. And every day when the jailor comes to feed him and the other prisoners, the jailor begins to describe the food and the drink in very unflattering and disgusting sounding terms. He describes milk as it being a secretion from a cow, and continues to make is sound as if what he was drinking was urine from the cow.
Until one day common sense hits John and he stands up to confront the jailor. John begins to counter the jailor's arguments that no matter how much the jailor tried to make it seem as though milk and urine were the same, there was a clear difference. For though are are both secretions from a cow, one is clearly for the good, and the other is clearly a waste product. One is clearly to nurture and promote well being and growth, the other is simply an excretion of waste.
John, through God given common sense had been able to see through the giant's farce, and today is no different. Though in this case, the public is given urine, and is told it is milk. The 8.3 sounds good, but the reality is that this is not milk, but the other excretion.

Poof! The Government’s 9 Million Jobless Vanishing Act
By Daniel Amerman CFA03/13/2012
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/daniel-amerman/making-9-million-jobless-vanish-how-the-government-manipulates-unemployment-statistics

When we look at broad measures of jobs and population, then the beginning of 2012 was one of the worst months in US history, with a total of 2.3 million people losing jobs or leaving the workforce in a single month. Yet, the official unemployment rate showed a decline from 8.5% to 8.3% in January - and was such cheering news that it set off a stock rally.

How can there be such a stark contrast between the cheerful surface and an underlying reality that is getting worse?

The true unemployment picture is hidden by essentially splitting jobless Americans up and putting them inside one of three different "boxes": the official unemployment box, the full unemployment box, and the most obscure box, the workforce participation rate box.

As we will explore herein, a detailed look at the government's own data base shows that about 9 million people without jobs have been removed from the labor force simply by the government defining them as not being in the labor force anymore. Indeed - effectively all of the decreases in unemployment rate percentages since 2009 have come not from new jobs, but through reducing the workforce participation rate so that millions of jobless people are removed from the labor force by definition.

When we pierce through this statistical smoke and mirrors and factor back in those 9 million jobless whom the government has defined out of existence, then the true unemployment rate is 19.9% and rising, and not 8.3% and falling.

For the small percentage of people who are aware that the purported decline in unemployment rates is primarily based on the mysterious rapid decline in "labor force participation rates" rather than the number of new jobs, the government has a ready and sensible-sounding explanation: the Boomers are beginning to retire in large numbers, and with an aging population, the percentage of adults who are in the workforce should logically be declining.

Based on in-depth analysis of the government's own numbers, we will present herein the true picture: 74% of the jobless who have been removed from unemployment calculations are in the 16-54 age bracket, with only 26% in the 55 and above bracket. Yes, the population is aging - but the heart of the workforce participation deception isn't about the old.

In an extraordinarily cynical act, the government is effectively saying that because the job situation has been so bad for many millions of unemployed people in their 40s, 30s, 20s and teens, they can no longer be considered to be potential participants in the work force at all. Because there is no hope for them - they no longer need to be counted. And it is this steady statistical cleansing from the workforce of the worst of the economic casualties - of these very real millions of individual tragedies - that is being presented as a rapidly improving jobs picture.

What the government's statistical deception is hiding is a catastrophic degree of change in generational employment levels, with the situation being much worse for the young and middle-aged than what is publicly presented. As the fundamental force of aging Boomers increasingly collides with the fundamental force of an employment disaster among younger Americans, the results may change everything that we think we know about economic growth, budget deficits, Social Security and Medicare, as well as all categories of investments.