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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".

York: Obama faces defeat on Keystone pipeline | Campaign 2012 …

campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com4/20/12

While much of the political world obsesses over Twitter fights and Seamus the dog, Barack Obama has set himself up for a high-profile defeat on one of the most important issues of the campaign. The president has put his feet in cement in …

Oil and gas news summary: Gulf Keystone Petroleum, Sefton …

www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk5/5/12

This week, Gulf Keystone Petroleum (LON:GKP) released another update from its closely followed exploration campaign in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

It seems likely that Barack Obama has set himself up for a high-profile defeat on one of the most important issues of the campaign.

And he didn’t help his cause when he staged an odd photo-op last month, delivering a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma in front of huge stockpiles of pipes.

Obama sang the praises of pipelines:

"It is critical that we make pipeline infrastructure a top priority",

and made a big deal of his approval of a section of domestic pipeline that didn’t need his approval.

He remained unyielding on Keystone however which seems strange since more and more Democrats are joining Republicans to force approval of the pipeline, whether he wants it or not.

The House

The latest action happened on Wednesday, April 18, when the House passed a measure to move the pipeline forward.

Before the vote, Obama somewhat dramatically issued a veto threat but the House approved the pipeline anyway.

By a veto-proof majority, 293 to 127 and sixty-nine Democrats abandoned the president to vote with Republicans.

When the House voted on the pipeline in July of last year, 47 Democrats broke with the president.

It’s an election year now and the number is up to 69, so look for Republicans to hold more pipeline votes before November, since GOP leaders expect even more Democrats to join them.

The Senate

In the Senate, Democrats are using the filibuster to stop the pipeline, meaning that 60 votes are required to pass it.

In a vote last month, 11 Senate Democrats voted in favor of the pipeline, and if you add those 11 to the Republicans’ 47 votes, then the pro-pipeline forces are just a couple of votes away from breaking Harry Reid’s filibuster.

"We’re right around the corner from actually passing it",

"Two-hundred-ninety-three votes in the House is a gigantic number. People want this thing".

Says a well-informed Senate source.

The Transportation Bill

The pipeline measure is attached to a larger transportation bill, that the Senate already passed, and the the Keystone provision was added later.

So it’s not clear whether the pipeline attachment will end up in the final bill.

It is certain though, that whatever happens, that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will force another vote on Keystone sometime.

To Veto Or Not To Veto?

If the pipeline does win those last couple of Senate Democrats, then Obama will be faced with a bill that passed with a veto-proof majority in the House, and over a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

The president would then be forced either to make good on his veto threat, or to sign a bill moving the pipeline forward, neither of which would leave him looking good.

If he signed the bill, then he’d surely try to save face by claiming that his concerns about the pipeline’s routing and approval process had been met.

But there’s no way it would be seen as anything less than a major defeat!

And if he vetoed the pipeline, then he’d face an embarrassing rebuff in the House.

Back To The Senate

In the Senate, it would take 67 votes to overturn the veto, and that’s probably an insurmountable obstacle for pipeline supporters and all the president would need is 34 Democratic dead-enders to stick with him to stop the pipeline.

But Obama could prevail only at grave political cost.

The rise in gas prices is a potent issue for Mitt Romney and Republicans, and it could become far more potent if prices increase in the summer.

The president would be left standing alone, not just against Republicans, but against a major coalition within his own party, including the large labor unions.

Definitely not a good place to be in, with an election just around the corner.

The Pipeline Will Most Likely Be Built

The odds are overwhelming that the Keystone pipeline will soon become a reality, and Obama will naively have hurt his reelection chances by trying to stop it.