Economy Tanks, But Unemployment Rate Drops. Here’s Why.

President Obama told a crowd in Indiana this week that by “almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency.” One of the economic measures that didn’t make the cut in Obama’s self-congratulatory statement, however, is the most important one: labor force participation — all those people not working — which has just reached a devastating new high of 94,708,000.

In May, the economy added a six-year low of only 38,000 jobs (experts predicted we’d add 160,000), while those who gave up searching for jobs soared by 664,000. The result is a drop in the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent (it’s high under Obama was 10 percent) — something the president will undoubtedly tout, while the truth is our economy is tanking.

As ZeroHedge explains, May’s “paltry” 38,000 jobs (the household survey shows an even worse 26,000), along with the significantly downgraded numbers from March and April, is impossible to spin as “anything but atrocious.”

Rather than being a sign of growth, the decline in the unemployment number is actually evidence of economic deterioration.

“The unemployment rate tumbled to 4.7%, the lowest since August 2007, driven entirely by a massive exodus of people from the labor force: 664,000 potential workers exited the labor force pushing the number ouf of the workforce to a record high 94.7 million,” ZeroHedge notes.

Some of the reasons for the losses: Verizon subtracting 35,000 workers, temp jobs failing to increase, stagnant trade and transportation services numbers, the continued loss of jobs in mining (down 10,000 in May), and a loss of 34,000 jobs in information, which ZeroHedge says is “the first time the BLS acknowledged that the tech bubble has also burst.”

But don’t worry, these “atrocious” numbers won’t get the president off message: He’s saved the economy, and if we want to continue to see such miraculous “recovery,” we have to put another Democrat in office.