Sorry, no mitigating changes in labor force size to soften the blow of this month’s unemploymen

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. Please leave any comments there.

For shame. On the Daily Kos, Meteor Bladespresum[es] . . . out-of-work Americans who had dropped out of the labor force have been lured back in by news that the situation is improving.” He could have just looked at the numbers.

Obviously, he didn’t. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, they included 153,904,000 people in the labor force in October and 154,007,000 in November. The number excluded also rose from 84,626,000 in October to 84,708,000 in November. Those are pretty small changes. But as a changes in percentages, the number included rose 0.067 percent and the number excluded rose 0.097 percent, suggesting the BLS was a little busier excluding people than they were including people.

The hard cold fact is that this month’s unemployment report is simply bad news and there isn’t any way to spin it as positive.