Okay did some looking around to try and understand the constant statements of anti-bush types everytime the unemployment rate goes down. We get the same story that we are still in depression and the only reason the employment rate is going down is because people are leaving the workforce.
Econopundit addresses this. I do not pretend to understand this all.
Caption: While driving back to the office I heard some NPR expert explaining why the current employment figures only look good because so many job seekers have gotten discouraged and dropped out of the labor market.
Here's BLS series LNS13327707, seasonally adjusted total unemployed plus discouraged workers as a percent of civilian labor force plus discouraged workers. Don't be confused here. This is what the unemployment rate would look like if we included discouraged workers in the calculation:
I guess I could be missing something, but the BLS inclusive-of-discourage-worker-effect seems to be going down, not up.