If you believe Democrats (and, you know, I could stop writing right there), the economy is recovering.

But if the economy is recovering, why is Congress passing an extension of unemployment benefits?

Ask U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisconsin), who congratulated herself in a news release:

A new report released by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee shows that the long-term unemployment rate is twice what it was when Congress last allowed federal unemployment insurance to expire after the recessions of 1990-91 and 2001. Approximately 1.3 million workers, including 23,700 Wisconsinites, lost all unemployment benefits when Congress failed to act before the end of December.

Maybe Baldwin should have a conversation with her president about our great economy. Baldwin also fired shots at Gov. Scott Walker, ignoring the fact that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is lower than the nation’s, and has been lower than the nation’s throughout Walker’s term as governor.

The obvious explanation of that previous paragraph is that it’s an election year. The other answer is that, well, the economy isn’t recovering in ways non-economists can see, reports John Lott:

It has been over four-and-a-half years since the economic “recovery” began, yet a new CNN poll indicates that almost seven out of every ten Americans considers the economy to be in poor shape.

Democrats want to claim that the economy is improving at the same time that they will be pushing Monday for a continued extension of unemployment benefits. Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that up to two years of unemployment insurance benefits actually creates unemployment.

Indeed, people are so worried about the job market that they are clinging to their current jobs at remarkably high rates.

Quit rates that usually rise after recessions, particularly after long recessions when they have stayed with jobs they might not care for, are still lower over the last three months than they were during the recession.

But how can that possibly be?

The official unemployment rate keeps falling. We are told that the job market is improving.  Are Americans just not realizing that things are getting better? Or do they perceive of something that the unemployment numbers are not picking up?

The answer is the latter.

The unemployment numbers do not accurately reflect the state of the labor market.  The reason is that the unemployment rate only considers those who are actively looking for work, failing to include the ones who have become so discouraged that they no longer look for a job.

Even the broader U6 measure of unemployment only includes these discouraged workers in its count for just one year.  With the traditional measure of unemployment that keeps being reported on the news, these discouraged individuals are counted as officially having left the labor force.

Imagine if workers had not dropped out and that the labor force participation had remained the same as it was when Obama became president 60 months ago. …

 

As we can see, the official unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009 and slowly fell to 7 percent today.  But if we add the drop-outs to the unemployed, the current rate would still be 11 percent, virtually unchanged since it hit 11.1 percent in October 2009.