The Washington Times reports. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama’s reelection efforts received a terrible blow today from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), with numbers showing a very grim and poor outlook on the future of America’s economy.

Though the official Department of Labor number shows that the unemployment rate dropped from 8.5% in December 2011 to 8.3% in January 2012, the CBO report states that, “The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent.”

[…]The rate of unemployment has been above 8% since February 2009, making the past three years under President Obama the longest stretch of high unemployment in the United States since the Great Depression.

Additionally, the CBO reports that the unemployment rate in America will stay above 8% through the election of 2012 and even until 2014.

“…the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The share of unemployed people who have been looking for work for more than six months — referred to as the long-term unemployed — topped 40 percent in December 2009 and has remained above that level ever since.”

When Obama took office in 2009, the official rate was 7.8%. He promised to keep unemployment under 8% when he took office, but only three years into his administration has it finally dropped below 9%.

[…]85% of small businesses are no longer hiring and only 13% rate the U.S. Economy as good or excellent.

Obama seems to think that taxing and regulating job creators is a good idea – that it will create more jobs. He raises taxes and passes more burdensome regulations. Business owners respond by expanding their businesses somewhere else where there is less regulation and lower taxes.

From Zero Hedge.

Excerpt:

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.

Click here for the charts.