The White House is sure to spend today touting this morning’s unemployment numbers, showing the economy losing a better than expected 247,000 jobs, with the unemployment rate dipping to 9.4 percent in July, from 9.5 percent in June. The reason why the unemployment rate fell even though the economy lost jobs is that there were 796,000 discouraged workers in July, which means they dropped out of the labor force because of weak job prospects, so they aren’t reflected in the unemployment rate. At the same time, the labor participation rate declined by .2 percent to 65.5 percent.
