Obama's Legacy: Unemployment Just Shot Up to 11.6%

Obama likes to talk about how the Republicans want to return to the "failed policies of the past".  Well, as this mornings unemployment report showed, his policies are failing us miserably in the present.  The official unemployment rate may have fallen to 8.1% but that is only because the labor force participation rate fell to a 31 year low (if people aren't deemed to be participating, they aren't considered to be unemployed by the official number):

That chart is pretty horrific.  A full 368,000 people have dropped out of the labor force in one month, bringing the total number of dropouts under Obama's watch to 6.1 million.  If you add those people back into the figures our real unemployment rate is actually at a whopping 11.6% (up from 11.5% last month), very close to the recession highs:

It's very clear from the blue line that nothing that Obama has done has been successful on the jobs front.  Not his massive stimulus package and definitely not all those horrific regulations that are strangling businesses, small and large.

This is not only bad news from an economic standpoint but from a fiscal policy standpoint as well.  We're down to an employment to population ratio of only 58.3%, it's hard to support federal spending at the rate we're at when only 58.3% of the 16+ population is working:

 The wealthy aren't the problem, it's Obama's policies which has created an army of permanently unemployed: