The unemployment rate ticked down to 7.7%, a rate which used to be considered horrible, and now is considered a triumph for our triumphalist President. Driving the downtick was a sharp upturn in solid middle-class manufacturing jobs and high-skilled jobs in high value-added high-tech startup companies...
Or not. Actually driving the unemployment rate downtick was the fact that 540,000 more people dropped out of the workforce.
Look, don't be fooled. We've told you this a million times:
1. We need about 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Anything less than that and we're losing ground. If we get that it basically means that the economy is flat, not growing.
2. The unemployment rate -- the rate of unemployment for people who are actually looking for work -- doesn't matter as much as the employment to population ratio, which continues to be in the crapper:
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