Bernie Sanders says jobs report doesn't tell the whole story

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- America's unemployment rate dropped below 5 percent for the first time in eight years, but Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is not moved.

"There's another government statistic that comes out at the same time that does not often get reported, which looks at unemployment not only for those who don't have jobs, but those who are working part-time when they want to work full-time," Sanders said Friday at an event in Manchester, N.H. "And that's a lot of people in this country. And those people in high unemployment areas who have given up looking for work."

The number of unemployed people in America -- 7.8 million -- does not factor in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "involuntary part-time workers." Buried further down in the jobs report released Friday, the bureau counted 6 million such workers.

"When you add all that together, you've got 9.9 percent unemployment, which is a serious problem," Sanders said. Despite Sanders' lukewarm response to the report, he knocked Republicans for being even less enthusiastic.

"Well, today I think, unless you are very, very partisan — and it does astound me how some of my Republican colleagues can go around talking about the problems we have, and of course we do have economic problems today, ignoring where we came from in the last seven years," he said. "When President [George W.] Bush left office, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. That's seven years ago, 800,000 jobs a month. An astronomical number."