UNEMPLOYMENT: "We Tried Our Plan, and It Worked...."

The only problem for President Obama and his economic team is that too few Americans chose to exit the U.S. civilian labor force as they desired. In order to have achieved their goals, they would have needed to remove an additional 2% of the U.S. working age population from the ranks of the nation's civilian labor force.

That would be on top of the 2% of the U.S. working age population that they successfully removed from the U.S. work force since January 2009. With the current civilian labor force participation rate standing at 63.7%, that additional 2% reduction in the number of Americans in the civilian labor force works out to be roughly an additional 4.9 million people.

What can we say? Apparently, the President and his team have decided that culling the U.S. work force is a lot easier for them to do than generating real job-creating economic growth.

Well, almost worked. Those obstinate Americans kept looking for work rather than drop out of the workforce altogether as Obama expected them to.