Obama's Real Unemployment Rate Is In Double Digits

◼ Once again, a bad jobs report comes out, and both the White House and the media trumpet it as "good" news and a sign the economy's turning around. It is in fact a dismal jobs report, as the numbers clearly show.

On the surface, the headline numbers don't look so bad. The Labor Department reported that U.S. businesses created 163,000 net new payroll jobs in July, while the unemployment rate was "essentially unchanged" at 8.3%.

No sooner had the numbers come out than President Obama was standing at a podium before the cameras, claiming credit for the job growth and again blaming former President Bush for the bad state of the economy.

"This morning we learned that our businesses created 172,000 new jobs in the month of July," he said. "That means that we've now created 4.5 million over the last 29 months and 1.1 million new jobs so far this year."

But "we" haven't in fact created any jobs. As a matter of fact, since Obama has entered office, some 1.1 million payroll jobs have disappeared.

We had to look twice at Obama's comments to make sure they weren't cribbed from Jon Stewart or some other late-night-TV jokester, because in truth, the real jobs economy is imploding in an unprecedented way.

Take the 163,000 "new" jobs Obama took credit for. That number comes from a monthly survey of businesses. But it's not a pure number. To get it, the government has to estimate the number of jobs created by new businesses. It also adds seasonal adjustment factors.

The 163,000 figure becomes even more suspect when you consider that 150,000 people left the workforce in July — something that almost never happens when the economy is expanding and creating new jobs. In short, the 163,000 "new" jobs is a mirage due mostly to seasonal adjustments — not real jobs.