While all that may be true, it is too complicated and obtuse to understand and to matter. What matters is that unemployment fell. That is easy and understandable.
To counter that simple contirved reality, there must still be pain. If the pain is felt from all those jobless and suffering is great enough7 to overcome the euphoria induced by the faling rate, The Messiah loses
Just because people stopped looking for jobs because they get discouraged when they can not find a job does not mean the unemployment rate went down
I ported the labor force participation graph to FaceBook and let it stand by itself. I think that is the way to approach this, because you are correct that it is a blizzard of data otherwise for those not economically trained (that would be the vast majority of people).
I recommend picking a vital graph and dealing with it elsewhere. Hopefully it will stimulat questions that one of the other graphs might answer. My worry is that there will be no response and this information will go right into the memory hole. Not that people are too busy with American Idol but that they are so deep in despair they no longer even care to know why this is happening to them.
You are correct, it is too complicated and obtuse. What really matters though is not the UNEMPLOYMENT number but the PERCENTAGE OF THE LABOR FORCE THAT IS EMPLOYED. It is dismal and that statistic flips the conversation from cooking the books of unemployment through reducing the labor force numbers by the group that is no longer receiving benefits, not registered as unemployed, has given up or is underemployed.
Lets just report the number of people employed as a percentage of the total population of people able to work.