BloombergBusinessWeek says just two months before the presidential election, the U.S. economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, indicating recovery from the recession still has a lot of ground to cover. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent, due to 368,000 leaving the work force, as the labor-force participation rate (the share of people in the workforce) fell to its lowest rate since Sept. 1981. If the same number of people who were in the workforce when the recession began continued in the workforce today, the unemployment rate would be 11.6 percent. As MHProNews has learned, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta says, given the current workforce, it would take three years of monthly job gains averaging 193,000 to reduce the unemployment rate to six percent.

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