Well there’s a mixed blessing.

05 Dec, 2009 by TrogloPundit

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Headline: Unemployment Rate Falls to 10%.

Unemployment is down! Hip hip…oh, no, wait, it’s still at 10%. Holy crap. And this is the good news?

And…is it really the good news? Here’s the story from the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. job losses in November posted the smallest drop since the start of the recession and the unemployment rate unexpectedly declined, a sign the labor market is finally healing as the economy recovers.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by just 11,000 last month, slowing down from a downwardly revised 111,000 drop seen in October, as the recovery encouraged some companies to retain workers, the Labor Department said Friday.

So: we lost jobs, but the unemployment rate fell. That doesn’t mean more people are working: it just means fewer people are looking for work.

Touting a drop in unemployment because of people dropping out of the workforce…isn’t that a little like bragging on your diet because you only had a double-scoop ice cream cone instead of the triple-scoop with caramel?

I’m not an economist, unless reading Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics” makes me one, which it doesn’t, so I’m not, and I’ll quit with the name-dropping now. Maybe the workforce was oversaturated somehow, so a diminished workforce is actually a good thing. Maybe there was a “people who really want a job” bubble. Dunno.

Regardless. This makes for some strange good news.

(The TrogloPundit, a.k.a. Lance Burri, blogs regularly as The TrogloPundit)