The White House is fully aware that a sharp drop in the total labor force is largely to credit for the fact that the nation’s unemployment rate has fallen below 9 percent.
In a blog post, White House Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Alan Krueger noted that “about half of the drop in unemployment in the household survey was due to a decline in the labor force (-315,000) and about half to employment growth (+278,000).”
Krueger went on to add that although the official national jobless rate is now at 8.6 percent, “the pace of improvement is still not fast enough given the large job losses from the recession that began in December 2007.”