The funny numbers came in a veritable torrent today. For instance, the so-called U-3 unemployment rate dropped to a 17-year low of 4.1% for October. Yet the same BLS household survey which posted the lowest unemployment rate since early 2000 showed that the number of employed Americans actually sank by 484,000 last month.

How’s that?

Well, easy as pie according to the data mavens at the BLS. It seems that the number of persons not in the labor force soared by 969,000 in October. So, yes, with a smaller numerator and an even smaller denominator they came up with a better—nay, awesome—-unemployment rate.

Then again, none of the talking heads on bubblevision even mentioned the staggering loss of 484,000 jobs during the month because they ignore the household survey’s job count entirely in favor of the establishment survey number (up 261,000)—– even though the former drives the unemployment rate, which they crow about endlessly.

This cherry-picking of the data is quite understandable, however, when you consider what is really buried in the household survey and is completely ignored by the stock peddlers. To wit, not so awesome at all is the fact that during October there was an all-time record of 95.4 million persons not in the labor force and another 6.5 million that were jobless—-meaning 102 Americans (16 and older) don’t have jobs.

That compares to 42 million retired workers on social security. Consequently, there are 60 million adult Americans who are housewives, students, disabled, food stamp and welfare recipients, social security dependents, dwellers in mom’s basement or denizens of the illegal drug, gambling or sex trades.

To be sure, we don’t have any special opinion on the merits of these pursuits, but we do have a point of view on the societal and fiscal math. Namely, the diminishing relative ranks of workers and tax mules in American society are going to buckle under the weight of baby boom retirements and soaring welfare and public sector health care costs in the years just ahead.

In that context, one of the most striking numbers in today’s report is that 53.0 million prime-age men 25 to 54 years old were employed in October 2017. As is evident in the chart below, that is down by 1.5 million jobholders since the pre-crisis peak in May 2007 and virtually identical to the number in January 2001.

Stated differently, there has been no gain in employed prime-age male workers during the entirety of this century!

At the same time, the number of social security recipients at the turn of the century was 45 million and is currently 61 million. But due to the inexorability of baby boom demographics and entitlement laws passed years and decades ago, that number will rise to 83 million by 2027.

We mention this dilemma of exploding entitlement recipients and stagnant numbers of workers and taxpayers because it’s relevant to another set of funny numbers currently on the radar screen. We are referring to the GOP’s budget resolution for FY 2018—-which whiffs completely on the entitlement monster while promising big middle-class tax cuts.

As to the entitlements matter, the CBO baseline projects outlays of $24 trillion over the next decade for social security, Medicare and SSI (supplemental security income—mainly for the poor elderly). These expenditures are overwhelmingly driven by the baby boom retirement bow wave, and actually, constitute 50% of the $48 trillion baseline for total Federal spending (ex-interest) during the 10-year period.

Yet as we have previously explained, the House budget resolution does not include a mandatory reconciliation instruction to the standing committees to cut a single dime from these giant entitlements. So like some kind of budgetary doomsday machine, nothing will happen to change the law, and the demographically driven spending levels will rise automatically and indefinitely.