What the Democrats and most of the media refuse to tell about the unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor, the main reason the unemployment rate has dropped is because of all the people who have stopped looking for work. The Bureau of Labor does not count them as unemployed. There were 80 million unemployed Americans when Obama took office, that number is now over 92 million. The labor force participation rate is 62.8 percent. No president since Jimmy Carter has had such an abysmal labor force participation rate.