The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment via a massive phone survey, which works great if you have 30 minutes to divulge personal information about every member in the household to a caller ID labeled "Potential Spam." Full time, part time, and temporary work are counted as "employed." You're "unemployed" if you're out of work and looking for a new job, but if you've been unsuccessfully trying for a year, you drop out of the labor pool entirely- they don't count you. The number of "jobs created" relies on voluntary data from primarily large companies; this information is not corroborated with a third-party source. I could run a popsicle stand in NYC and tell the BLS that I was hiring five hundred full time workers. They throw out phrases like "strong consumer spending." Well yes- things are more expensive, so we're spending more. Our economy is 75% consumer-driven; we don't make our own clothes, shoes, toilet paper etc. We're doing far worse than the media portrays and the BLS is flying blind.