Maggie's Farm

"Yeah. Unemployment goes down as the labor participation rate goes down. An Alice in Wonderland type phenomenon, don't you think?"

Oh, over here in Europe they've discovered another way:
Unemployment agencies "encourage" (read, pressure/coerce) unemployed people to become self-employed, to start their own business as "consultants". There's even special tax programs for so called "self-employed without staff" people.
Of course 90%+ of them fail because they have no training in running a business, no proper business plan, no cash reserves, no potential customer base, and no support from anyone to build all that (and because of the way unemployment regulations work here they can't take training courses in all that while unemployed, because you need to be available 24/7 for job interviews while unemployed and you're not so when in a classroom...). But after failure they no longer are counted as unemployed because they were not previously employed. They now count as simply "failed businesses" and get nothing at all, not even social security.
This is creating a large number of extremely poor people, with massive debt to the government (who of course insists on them paying business taxes over the months they tried to get their business started, then has them declared bankrupt so they can sneak in before banks to take whatever money they manage to scrounge together after their business inevitably fails) who have nowhere to turn (most of them are not minorities, so "charities" to help them get back on their feet hardly exist either, most of those being (to prevent racism obviously) specific to certain minorities only).