How Fraudulent Was the January Unemployment Number? Unemployment Actually Went UP last month, Not Down

I've written about this quite a few times before (most recently here). Essentially, the unemployment number reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is complete fiction as millions of workers have been thrown out of the labor force, artificially lowering the unemployment rate. If you look at the labor force participation rate, it is now at multi-decade lows:

As you can see, the labor force participation rate is now down over 2% since Obama has taken office. Some would argue that this is due to demographics, as baby boomers leave the labor force as they reach retirement. The problem with this argument is that if you look at the participation rate for those 55 and up, it is slightly up since Obama has taken office. All the decline in due to those who would be considered to be in their peak working years. If you keep the rate at 66%, where it was at right before Obama was elected it appears that there are 5 million people missing from the unemployment data, and it seems to be spiking right now:

What does this mean for the unemployment rate itself? By my calculations, if you keep the missing people in, it is 11.4% right now, up 0.1% from last month when it ws 11.3%. The whole thing about it being down to 8.3% is absolute hogwash. Below you can see the striking difference between the real unemployment rate and the official one:

It's really a striking divergence isn't it? While the official rate seems to show a 1.7% improvement in the unemployment rate since the peak, the improvement is really a paltry 0.4%! And if you don't believe me, check out the government's own employment to population ratio which is also at multi-decade lows: