The good news is the official unemployment number dropped a point and is now 8.2 percent. The bad news is the reason the official number dropped is because 87,897,000 people are no longer in the labor force.
As James Glassman, senior economist at JP Morgan Chase & Co. in New York, said in an interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene, back in December 2011, "You’d like to see the unemployment rate coming down when people are coming into the job market, not disappearing."
According to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U6, real time unemployment which is the total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, is still over 14 percent.
Once again, as is usual in our unemployment pieces we list areas still at or above the official national average for unemployment are:
Arizona- 8.7%
California- 10.9%
D.C.- 9.9%
Florida- 9.4%
Georgia- 9.1%
Illinois- 9.1%
Indiana- 8.4%
Kentucky- 8.7%
Michigan- 8.8%
Mississippi- 9.5%
Nevada- 12.3%
New Jersey- 9.0%
New York - 8.5%
North Carolina- 9.9%
Oregon- 8.8%
Rhode Island- 11.0%
South Carolina- 9.1%
Washington- 8.2%
Data obtained from Bureau of Labor Statistics on the Local Area Unemployment Statistics page. (Right side)
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