UNEMPLOYMENT RATE FALLS AFTER 23,000 PEOPLE DECIDE JOBS ARE A SCAM
Economists confirm the labor market is thriving, provided you stop asking anyone in it how they're doing.
The Labor Department announced Friday that the unemployment rate dipped to 4.1% even as the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a statistical feat achieved by simply declining to count anyone who got tired of looking. Analysts had expected 80,000 new jobs; instead they got a rounding error, a stack of downward revisions erasing over 100,000 previously announced jobs, and a national mood best described as 'couch-adjacent.'
"People assume unemployment is about whether you have a job," said Dr. Carla Fenwick, senior fellow at the Institute for Aggressive Optimism. "It's actually about whether you're still filling out the paperwork to be sad on the record. Enough people give up, stop applying, start doing landscaping for their brother-in-law under the table, and boom — full employment. It's basically astrology with spreadsheets, except the spreadsheets get revised down 100,000 later when nobody's looking." Fenwick added that government, retail, and leisure sectors shed workers largely because employers finally noticed nobody was buying anything, which she called 'a self-solving problem, statistically speaking.'
Former retail associate Doug Prell, laid off in June and now officially outside the labor force, said he's never felt more like a national success story. "I haven't worked in seven weeks and I'm told the economy is basically fine now because of guys like me," Prell said, reclining on a couch he described as 'load-bearing.' "I called my mom and told her I'm no longer a statistic, I'm a rounding decision. She cried. Good tears, I think. The Fed's probably not raising rates because of what I did. You're welcome, America."
