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I’m REALLY confused. Maybe someone here at the reliable Sunday Talk Show thread can help me.

Friday it was reported that about 96,000 “new jobs” were added, lower than “expected.” It was also reported that about 400,000 people “dropped out of the workforce.” Thus, while fewer people went to work, the “unemployment rate” improved by .2 points. Wow.

First: what is a “new job?” Is it something that didn’t exist, like the 13th job at a company that formerly only had 12—Or is it that Joe down the street, who was out of work, finally found a job?

But if it’s job #13 does it have to be filled yet to count in the stats? Or can it just exist as an unfilled want-ad, “Desperately Seeking Susan” or like that?

What is a new job? Who has one? Does anyone HAVE to have it? (Could maybe I still get it?)

O.K. Let’s move on to the REALLY MYSTERIOUS thing here.

It seems that every month hundreds of thousands of Americans “drop out of the workforce.” I think I heard that 4 million have done it since whenever.

But what does this actually mean? Who are these people, where are they, what do they do now. I have many questions about those who “drop out of the workforce.”

1. Were these people in the “workforce” because they were working? Don’t their employers need to replace them? If a guy is managing a parking garage and one night says, “The hell with this, I’m dropping out of the workforce,” doesn’t his employer need to replace him? If he replaces him, why does any of it count one way or the other in the “unemployment rate.” Somebody else gets a job if someone “drops out of workforce,” right? Or do they just not hire another manager at all and let everyone park for free at the garage because Bill “dropped out of the workforce?”

2. Can you be in the workforce but not have a job? If you don’t have a job, what makes you part of the “workforce” in the first place? If you already don’t have a job, what difference does it make that you have “dropped out of the workforce?” You weren’t really working in the workforce anyway.

3. Has the media ever identified a person who “dropped out of the workforce?” (Would there be a better chance of such a person being found by the media if Romney was elected? Like how all the “homeless” showed up the minute after Reagan swore the oath.)

Again—there are something like 4 million people who have “dropped out of the workforce.” How many have the media found? Are they all camera shy?

Do you personally know anyone who “dropped out of the workforce?” Was there cake and ice cream to celebrate? Do you get a gold watch that doesn’t run for “dropping out of the workforce?”

4. Um.... I dunno. I’m not even sure I know what the “workforce” is. And that makes me wonder what it is that people do when they “drop out” of it. As near as I can tell, they disappear — like people did back in the Soviet Union. Poof! There one minute, gone the next.

5. What about the raw numbers here? The media says that 96,000 new jobs created by the African-American president is still nonetheless a good thing. That’s about 2,000 jobs per state if you think of all the states equally (no one does that anymore because the states are just basically racist entities that don’t matter in comparison to what Van Jones thinks but I digress).

Anyway these numbers seem to mean that something like 9,000 people just dropped out of the workforce in the same state where 2,000 new jobs were added. The media doesn’t seem to think 9,000 is MORE THAN 2,000, because these “dropouts” are...I dunno...not important enough to even GO FIND THEM.

And if 9 people are dropping out for every 2 new jobs, how is anyone getting employed at all?

OK Well... If one thing is clear here, it is that I’m utterly confused about all this. If anyone can help me, I’d appreciate. If I’ve made someone else so exasperated that I compelled them to drop out of the Sunday thread I’m really sorry about that but don’t expect the media to come looking for you in any case.

Like Timothy Leary once said, “Tune in, turn on, drop out, vanish altogether.”

You’ll have to get Kabar to help you with this.

Cause the Democrats tell lies so much to try and make sense out of them is a waste of precious time.

I used to do payroll and do you know where they get the vast amount of their “on the payroll” and “off the payroll” from?

They get their data mostly from ADP, the great big outsource payroll processor.

Now I’ve used ADP plenty of times and yes, you mark an employee terminated when they leave and you add employees when they...eh, are hired.

The net of all this is the number net new jobs that is part of the jobs statistics and I really wonder how close it is.

But ADP is the country’s largest payroll processor and I’ll allow that the net job gain/loss in a given month is an indicator of how the jobs are going. As a sample size of the country it’s probably close to accurate.

I’ll never understand where they get this “dropped out of the job force number” from, though I know a whole lot of people that would meet that criteria.

Many of the constructions guys are working under the table. A lot of folks have applied for SS disability rather than to continue fighting younger and healthier for the few jobs available. This is just my anecdotal experience bear in mind. My nieces boyfriend, for example, has some kind of major pain problem and has had it for many years. I’m not clear on it but it’s a health issue he’s been battling for many years. When he lost his job he threw down the gauntlet and applied for SS, which he asserts he could have received many moons ago.

I know a few people who’ve fallen into this category...loss of a job impels them to finally apply for SS disability that they might have eschewed during an earlier time when jobs were plentiful.

These types would certainly qualify as folks who dropped out of the job market but I’ve no idea how they measure that number.

I believe it though.

This came up first in the Bing Google search, and it works just as well as any other:

To calculate the unemployment rate for a particular area or region, you will need to know the number of unemployed workers and the total number of people in the labor force in the particular area (such as a state or country). In the United States, this data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force refers to the number of people of working age and below retirement age who are actively participating in the work force or are actively seeking employment. Note that the total population of the area or region is irrelevant when calculating the unemployment rate.

Read more: How to Calculate Unemployment Rate | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4621309_calculate-unemployment-rate.html#ixzz25ywL3oUi

What that all means in relation to your questions is:

1. Yes, a new job is a job that did not exist before. So if 368,000 people apply for unemployment in a week and 378,000 new jobs are created (people are hired who didn't work there before) that means a net increase of 10,000 jobs in the economy.

Of course, if a construction worker loses a $60,000 per year job and 2 people get $10/hr jobs asking if you want fries with that, that is a net addition of 1 new job in the work force.

The BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) has a large army of experts who scientifically calculate exactly what they don't know (to 3 or 4 decimal places) and they calculate several different definitions of "unemployment". The one we hear about most is U6, which uses a denominator of "work force" and a numerator of "workers" to calculate the percentage of work force working. The difference is the unemployment rate.

So if you have about 111,000,000 people working in America and the number goes up 96,000 in a month to 111,096,000, that is a net creation of jobs. BUT, if the number of people in the work force drops by 368,000 from 121,000,000 to 120,632,000, then the decrease in the denominator makes the percentage look better.

And the 368,000 people who no longer count as unemployed no longer count because their benefits have run out, so they cease to exist in the BLS calculation. Unlike Chicago voters after they die, the BLS considers people who drop out of the work force to be not in the work force.

Now, if the drop outs decide to start looking again, they get added back to the denominator. And how they get added back is based on some complicated rules the counters at BLS use to determine who is in the work force and who is just dabbling. To make it even worse, very little of what the BLS does is based on hard numbers. Mostly it is based on voluntary survey participation, random phone calls, whether or not Joe Biden saw his shadow this morning, and any number of scientific confounders to make the final number impossible to dispute or prove.

That's why the government workers who do this make so much money.