The Bureau of Economic Analysis report may be found here. The customary summer revision of the data going back several years is also part of the release, here.
The revised real GDP numbers going back to 2008 are something of a stunner, revealing no real GDP growth in any year from 2008 at 2.5 percent or above.
I am reminded of this statement attributed to Ben Bernanke three years ago today at Reuters, here:
"So that's not enough to bring down the unemployment rate," he said.
Since we haven't had annual GDP growth of 2.5 percent for going on five years, declining unemployment obviously has had nothing to do with government action, but rather with the growing number of people not counted as unemployed. Headline unemployment is based on the answer to the question "Did you look for work in the last four weeks?" and if you answered "No" you are not counted as unemployed even if you are.
Americans have dropped out in massive numbers because they are tired of beating their heads against a wall of mismatched skills, massive age discrimination, cheaper foreign labor and inhospitable government policy toward business, and they no longer count, quite literally.
It's no surprise really. 50 million abortions since 1973 haven't counted either. And while a gunman killing a dozen or more in a theatre makes big news for a few days, a similar number of illegals dying in a truck crash a few days later doesn't.
The message of the "modern" world is that lives are expendable, especially unemployed lives, who are now nothing more than "depreciating assets".
