Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
May 6th, 2012 | 
Author: This Is Heartbreaking!
The following chart should be terrifying, and the fact that the MSM won’t go near the stats makes it even worse.
The worker participation rate started falling after the dot-com bust, and leveled off during the credit boom with hardly any job gains, and then it fell off a cliff when the recession started.
And not only hasn’t it bounced back, but instead, we’re now deep into pretty much unprecedented territory.
Was the participation rate ever this low before?
Yes, but back in 1981 and that was during the decades when women were seriously moving into the labor force.
Only 115 Million Full-Time And 27 Million Part-Workers In The US!
Mike Konczal who is a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, working on financial reform, unemployment, inequality and a progressive vision of the economy said:
"A key indicator of labor recession is still in force: if you’re unemployed, you’re still more likely to drop out of the labor force entirely than you are to find a job. And as Dan Alpert noted, in a country of 314 million people, there are only 115 million full-time workers and 27 million part-time workers. It’s really hard to get a robust recovery when the number of people earning money is so anemic".
For demographic reasons, the retirement of the baby boomers, the labor force participation rate is naturally going to fall over the next decade. But go back just one year, to March 2011, and look at the official CBO projection of the labor force participation rate. The CBO saw a rate of 64.6% in 2012, a full percentage point higher than we’re at right now. The participation rate wasn’t expected to fall to today’s level of 63.6% until 2017"
Does the above shock you?
Because it should!
The Jobs Created Smokescreen
The paltry 115,000 jobs created in April 2012 is saddening to say the the least, and so is the unemployment rate of 8.1% but both figures are hiding a horrific truth.
A total of 342,000 people left the labor force in April 2012 and the working-age population grew by 180,000, both of which mean that the total number of people no longer in the labor force actually went up by 522,000.
And when more than a half a million people in one month decide that they’re not even going to bother looking for work any more, there’s absolutely no way you can say that the US in a healthy recovery.
The Obama administration will point to hope and change of course.
The Employment Rate Numbers
Politically speaking, the unemployment rate is still the number that most people concentrate on.
But increasingly, being unemployed is little more than a halfway house between employment and dropping out of the labor force altogether.
Until the labor force participation rate stops falling and starts rising, then the so-called recovery will remain a theoretical economic entity and not a real-world reality for hundreds of millions of Americans.
So What Is The True State Of The Labor Market?
1. The U-6 measure of unemployment which includes discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work and is perhaps the truest measure of the labor market’s health, is a sky-high 14.5%.
2. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office, 65.7 percent then vs. 63.6 percent today, then the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.1%.
3. If you take into account the aging of the Baby Boomers, then the participation rate should be trending lower; and it has been doing just that that since 2000.
Before the recession, the Congressional Budget Office predicted what the participation rate would be in 2012, assuming such demographic changes and using that number, the real unemployment rate would be 10.7%.
4. It’s true that the participation rate usually falls during recessions, but even if you discount for that, and the aging issue, then the real unemployment rate is at 9.3%.
5. If the participation rate just stayed where it was last month, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%.
6. And given that real disposable income has been flat the past two years, it stands to reason that many of the jobs being created are in low-wage sectors. Indeed, hiring in sectors such as retail and leisure has accounted for 40% of the jobs added over the past two years.
The US needs jobs, and needs them now, but Obama and his extreme leftist administration can’t create them.
And the best quote that I read in a while about Paul Krugman was;
"Stimulus works in exactly the same way as trying to raise the level of a swimming pool by drawing a bucket of water out of the deep end and pouring it into the shallow end".
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CNN founder Ted Turner said something Thursday night that was guaranteed to cause a shudder down liberal spines, not only at the White House, but also at CNN, and at many other places too.
"Piers Morgan Tonight"
PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Let’s talk politics briefly, Ted. The election’s coming up in November. Mitt Romney is the likely Republican nominee for all intents and purposes. Who’s going to win, do you think?
TED TURNER: I don’t know. When I started CNN, I made the decision to stay out of endorsing candidates, and let the viewers make up their own minds about politics, that it wasn’t going to come from me. The other networks were all telling everybody what to do. But I wanted to be different and let people make up their own minds.
So I didn’t, I would talk about candidates. And I can say this about Mitt Romney, I think he’s a real gentleman. I think he’s been very successful. I think he’s really smart. I don’t agree with everything that he believes, but I agree with a lot of it. And I think that he’d probably make a good president.
MORGAN: Are you ….
TURNER: But I’m not endorsing him.
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