Wow at this rate, unemployment will be down to 5% if obama is elected to a 2nd term since everyone will have given up on finding a decent job.
Thats called obamanomics.
And progressives have the nerve to claim that the economy is in 'recovery' ?!
"Renaissance Thinking About the Issues of Our Day"
Comments
Nice try but people who watch Thom know full well that it's the policies of the corporate stooge Republicans that continue to decimate the middle class. It takes a lot of chutzpa to point the finger at Obama when we know that it was the Republicans who killed legislation that would have ended tax subsidies for corporations that ship jobs overseas and rewarded companies that brought jobs back home. I guess Republicans hate the working class more than they love America.
I wish we were operating under Obamanomics, the country would be well on its way to recovery. Instead, because of the tea party takeover in Congress in 2010, we're still operating under the same insane "trickle down" policies that crashed our economy in the first place.
Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low
Zero Hedge
Friday, February 3, 2012
A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.
Chart below shows it all – that jump is not a fat finger!
And Labor Force Participation:
This is the largest absolute jump in ‘Persons Not In Labor Force’ on record…and biggest percentage jump in 30 years.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/record-1-2-million-people-fall-out-of-labor-force-in-one-month-labor-force-participation-rate-tumbles-to-fresh-30-year-low.html#
Nice try but people who watch Thom know full well that it's the policies of the corporate stooge Republicans that continue to decimate the middle class. It takes a lot of chutzpa to point the finger at Obama when we know that it was the Republicans who killed legislation that would have ended tax subsidies for corporations that ship jobs overseas and rewarded companies that brought jobs back home. I guess Republicans hate the working class more than they love America.
I wish we were operating under Obamanomics, the country would be well on its way to recovery. Instead, because of the tea party takeover in Congress in 2010, we're still operating under the same insane "trickle down" policies that crashed our economy in the first place.
Right the blue-Globalists will do a much better job at economics than the red-Globalists.
Grow up and educate yourself to the ways of the world.
The American Dream Film-Full Length
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGk5ioEXlIM
The Money Masters.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&q=The+money+changers&ei=Zd4QSMjvB47YqAKQtJmzBA
It is such ignorance among left-wingers that has undermined the unions so much by electing these Globalist shills.
@mdhess,
If obama is reelected in November it will really be the fourth Bush term.
obama and bush both voted to bail out wall street.
bush = obama don't you get it !?!
it is the Tea Party that wants to eliminate the goverment crony train of plundering Main Street and rewarding corrupt, inefficient, and wasteful actors on Wall street, big oil, big insurance, big alternative energy, big pharma, big union, big envirnomental, et al.
If that were true, then explain why the Teabaggers seem to be the same pro war, anti Medicare Republicants.
Cuz Gloabslists put in their shills there as well as the Republican and Democrat parties.
It's called hijacking a movement.
This is what Sarah Palin tried to do with the TEA Party movement, but she is gone and Ron Paul is still standing cuz he's the real deal not some Globalist shill.
http://visualnews.columnfivemedia.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Occupy-Wall-Street-Tea-Party-venn-diagram-600x509.jpg
<( Where OWS and the TEA Parties overlap.)
The current jobs numbers are completely bogus but it isn't just Obama. I posted this article back in 2005 when Bush "Little Boots" Jr. was president and he used the same crap method as Reagan did back in the 80s when the unemployment numbers started counting the military and using "birth/death" small business "adjustments." So the Republican fascists are hypocritical to complain of the same deceit they used since Reagan. Obama still should be criticized for using the same jobs propaganda because he promised change, but it is just more of the same lies as we approach election time.
By Barry Ritholtz
12/21/2005
Job creation is crucial to any economic expansion. It directly affects consumer spending, and it's one of two key factors determining the health of real estate (the other being interest rates). One cannot overstate the importance of job creation to the economy.
Lately, the White House and Treasury Secretary John Snow have been trumpeting the fact that the economy has created 4.4 million new jobs since May 2003.
Inquiring minds want to know: How legit is that number? How was it derived? How does this job-creation data compare to prior cyclical recoveries?
Let's zoom in on the actual employment numbers and see what's there:
First question: How did the White House come up with that 4.4 million new-jobs number? Is it accurate?
The answer is simple math: Measured trough to peak, there were actually almost 4.5 million new jobs created. In May 2003, there were 129,827,000 people employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of November 2005, there were 134,289,000. That reflects 4,462,000 new jobs. So the "over 4.4 million jobs created" statement is numerically accurate.
So if that number is mathematically accurate, what's the problem?
As those of us who work on Wall Street know, you typically don't get to pick your time periods when measuring performance. You especially don't get to base it on trough-to-peak numbers. In most any series, there are more natural time periods, e.g., year to date, one, three and five years.
As opposed to cherry-picking the most favorable-looking time periods, job creation historically has been measured from the end of the recession, which the National Bureau of Economic Research puts at March 2001. Another commonly used period is from the start of the president's term (Jan. 20, 2001).
When we plug those time frames into the BLS data, we derive a significantly less rosy picture: Those calendar periods generate job-creation numbers of about 1,835,000. Also, the 4.4 million-job number conveniently ignores the 2.6 million jobs lost from 2001 to 2003.
Over the course of four years, those numbers fail to keep up with population growth. The U.S., with about 275 million people, needs more than 1 million new jobs per year -- between 125,000-150,000 per month -- just to maintain the same percentage of employed relative to the labor force.
As with any data series, you can make the numbers better or worse depending upon when you mark the beginning of your time period, as the chart below of nonfarm payroll data since January 2000 shows.
So the answer to our second question is that the 4.4 million number significantly overstates the true jobs picture since the end of the recession. Indeed, if this were a mutual fund, the Securities and Exchange Commission would not allow such an advantageously selective timeline to be used in the advertising.
Third question: We know the BLS model is a bit quirky and has some warts on it. How "real" are these numbers, and how much is theoretical conjecture?
That's a complex question, but let's take a stab at it. In 2001, the BLS started a new numerical projection called the birth/death adjustment. This replaced a prior adjustment known as the "bias factor." This new adjustment has been gradually phased in since 2001, and became fully implemented in 2003. That's convenient for our analysis, as it was fully integrated at about the same time that Treasury and the White House have used to reach their 4.4 million new-jobs number.
The birth/death adjustment was created, according to the BLS, to capture job creation of new firms that is missed by bureau methodology "due to an unavoidable lag between an establishment opening for business, and its non-sampling methods must be used to estimate this growth."
What the BLS does is estimate the number of new businesses coming into existence. It then projects how many new jobs these new firms create.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10258387/2/rethinking-the-strong-jobs-recovery-scenario.html
There is some debate on how accurate the birth/death adjustment is. Morgan Stanley's analysts have found it to be (mostly) reliable; John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics thinks it significantly overstates job creation.
I fall somewhere between the two. Given all the effort that goes into actually counting establishment jobs vs. merely estimating them, one would expect that this projection would be a relatively small number of the total new-job count. A modest estimate of new jobs created would be acceptable as a reasonable adjustment to the true data collection.
But that's not what we see when we take a look at the data closely: Of the 4.4 million new jobs from the March 2003 low until present, the birth/death estimate accounts for 1,639,000. That is an extremely significant 36.7% of new jobs.
By any measure, that's a hefty estimated adjustment to an actual data-based number. It is not particularly credible to me to have a statistical projection be more than a third of a measured data series. To be blunt, it is a game-changing "adjustment."
To get an idea of how big this is, imagine how your performance might be enhanced by goosing it more than a third: This would raise the output from so-so to spectacular. A mediocre baseball hitter (.250) becomes an MVP (.392); an average bowler (200) rolls a perfect game; meanwhile, a weekend duffer who shoots an 88 becomes club champ with a 56.
Nice statistical work, if you can get it.
Our last measure is not quantitative, as the prior three issues have been. It is qualitative:
As I've noted previously, the jobs recovery compares rather poorly with prior post-World War II recessions and their aftermaths. We've seen that the jobs created are unusually dependent upon the real estate complex. We also know that the private sector jobs created have, on average, paid less and have had weaker benefits than the jobs they've replaced. And we also see there has been an unusually large number of government jobs created. Overall, the jobs quality during this recovery is mediocre.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10258387/3/rethinking-the-strong-jobs-recovery-scenario.html
Not Up to Snuff
Job growth in the current recovery is weak by post-World War II standards
After all this data-crunching, one query remains: How does this jobs-recovery era compare to prior ones?
The answer, it turns out, is not particularly well. In fact, this is the eighth-worst jobs recovery of the prior 10 recessions, according to The New York Times.
What made this cycle somewhat unique was that the job count fell for another year and a half after the recession ended.
The reason for this is quite simple: Most economists have been looking at the post-recession period incorrectly. Instead of viewing this as a post-bubble economy, with the 2000 crash a rare event, they are looking at it as if it's just another postwar recession-recovery cycle. That misses the bigger issues.
By nearly any honest measure, this has been a lackluster jobs recovery. That is not widely believed among the investing population -- though consumer sentiment shows plenty of hesitancy.
The employment scene has been this bad since 2001 when Bush Jr. took office and the massive printing of money night and day has not stopped since. Obama has changed nothing and is continuing the same old policies that got us here.
By PETER MORICI
March 6, 2008
The dollar is trading at all time lows against the euro and gold for good reasons. The Bush Administration has flooded the world with greenbacks, and global investors have little confidence in the management of the U.S. economy.
During the Bush years, the U.S. trade deficit has doubled. Thanks to dysfunctional energy policies and tolerance for Chinese mercantilism, the deficit has exceeded $700 billion each of the last three years and is more than 5 percent of GDP.
The Bush energy policy emphasizes incentives for domestic oil production and letting rising prices instigate conservation but those have failed. Domestic crude oil production is falling, the price of gas has risen from $1.51 to $3.21, automakers have populated U.S. roads with fuel guzzling SUVs, and petroleum now accounts for about $380 billion of the trade deficit.
Cheap imports from China have chased millions of Americans from manufacturing jobs, as the U.S. purchases from the Middle Kingdom exceed sales there by nearly five to one. The trade deficit with China is about $250 billion.
China has engineered this competitive triumph by keeping its yuan even cheaper than the dollar, euro and gold. Annually, it sells at deep discount about $460 billion worth yuan for dollars, euros and other currencies in foreign exchange markets. That provides a 33 percent subsidy on Chinese exports and keeps Chinese goods cheap on the shelves at Wal-Mart.
The Bush Administration has sought changes in China's currency policies through diplomacy and has failed. Paradoxically, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has managed to tar as protectionist any proposal for U.S. government action to offset Chinese subsidies.
The remainder of the trade deficit is largely autos and parts from Japan and Korea, who through various means have kept the yen and won cheap too.
The huge trade deficit must be financed either by attracting foreign investment in new productive assets in the United States or by printing IOUs. Investment has only provided about 10 percent of necessary cash, so each year the United States sells currency, bank deposits, Treasury securities, bonds, and the like to foreigners. Those claims on the U.S. economy now total about $6.5 trillion.
That floods world financial markets with U.S. dollars and paper assets that function much like U.S. dollars-what economists call liquidity. And, it evokes an iron law of the universe. If you print too much money, it won't have any value.
Until recently, most of that borrowed purchasing power was put into the hands of U.S. consumers by the large Wall Street banks. Essentially, through mortgage brokers and regional banks, those Wall Street banks loaned Americans money to buy homes and refinance their mortgages. In turn, the banks got the cash needed by bundling mortgages, as well as auto loans and credit card debt, into collateralized-debt-obligations-bonds backed by consumer promises to pay-for sale to fixed income investors, hedge funds and others.
The bankers could get reasonably rich on this scheme but got greedy. Last summer, we learned that the banks were not creating legitimate bonds. Instead they sliced, diced and pureed loans into incomprehensibly arcane securities, and then sold, bought, resold, and insured those contraptions to generated fat fees, big profits and generous bonuses for bank executives.
Now investors ranging from U.S. insurance companies to the Saudi Royals are not much interested in buying bonds created by large U.S. banks, and the banks can no longer make loans to many credit-worthy consumers and businesses. Without credit, the U.S. economy cannot grow and prosper.
The Federal Reserve has direct regulatory responsibility for the large U.S. banks, and it is Ben Bernanke's job to require them to fix their business practices and resurrect the market for bonds backed by bank loans.
Yet, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke has offered no plan to address these problems, or even acknowledged the urgency of the situation. And, without a well functioning banking system, the U.S. economy heads into recession of uncertain depth and duration.
International investors, recognizing the U.S. economy lacks competent helmsmen at Treasury and the Federal Reserve, are fleeing the dollar for the best available substitute--the euro and gold.
When George Bush was inaugurated, the euro was trading at 94 cents and gold cost $266 an ounce. Now they are trading at $1.52 and $985 an ounce. That is a plain vote of no confidence in the BushBernanke economic model.
Peter Morici is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business and former Chief Economist, at the U.S. International Trade Commission.
A year or so ago I briefly researched these figures "U6" "U3" etc. and the only thing I recall is that they changed these categories so they cannot be compared apples to apples. I think they changed once under Reagan and once under Clinton, but don't quote me because I don't remember reading about it changing in 2001-2003.
It is all the same people from Bush's administration to Obama: they only change offices in the same building.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: “Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff.”
When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile — but the smile didn’t last long. There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.
The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff — arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.
Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported $18.5 million.
The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too. His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold onto your deposit slip — Citigroup.
Still with us? It’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration.
The last time a change was made in the way unemployment was reported was in 84, to basically make it easier to ignore the plight of the jobless, and to absolve govt from being responsible. The changes largely involved changing the definition for unemployed. It used to be that the U6 number is was what was reported, which is what is reported in the EU. Also, the safety net of Europe is different, healthcare is a right, and welfare is paid to those in need without a 6 week application process.
So to cry about the U3 # when that is what has been the conventional standard for 30 years is retarded. Unless the complaint is that both the career economists at the BLS and the people at ADP who issue their own free market report are all lying.
Its true that a lot of the same sleazy hacks are still in positions of power and that there is far too little difference between what Democrats stand for and what Republicans stand for but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up on despair and walk away. Or, as in the case of elgiabo, detach ourselves completely from reality and live in lala land. If we're going to change the dynamic in our economic system so that ordinary people don't suffer because of the reckless behavior of the financial elites it will have to come from the grassroots, i.e. OWS.
There is at present a concerted effort to discredit OWS coming from the mainstream but if ever we're going to get to a place where ordinary people needn't be constantly insecure and left at the mercy and whims of the financial power players then we can't just ignore reality and hope for the best. If the Democrats aren't responsive enough we need to make them respond but it won't do any good to just declare that you're above the fray and allow the two parties to continue propping up the status quo.
So we can argue about the real number of unemployed and point fingers or we can imagine something greater. We've let ourselves be conditioned into believing that life is harsh and unfair and that is how it is meant to be but it needn't be that way. We should be talking about building a society where there is work for anyone who wants it and a guarantee that full time employment will at least pay for life's necessities. What we have to put up with from "business" or "management" is intolerable, absolutely intolerable because not just government but our entire social order has been captured by capitalism and the interests of capital instead of humanity and the interests of humans.
This is the largest absolute jump in ‘Persons Not In Labor Force’ on record…and biggest percentage jump in 30 years.
Are these figures comparable, apples to apples, to 1982 (30 years?) Apparently BLS changed reporting sometime after 1980.
Although I suppose if it's the biggest percentage jump in... 25 years... 20 years... it is... alarming.
Or am I missing something?
I really don't know if I clean all this mess up.
Please stop arguing over the BLS statisitics. It is pointless and gives me a headache. The change in the unemployment rate is what matters - we all know how imperfect it is. Here are the facts.
1) Employment went up by 239k last month. That's great news. Especially since government employment fell.
2) TTP is correct that the labor force participation ratio went down - what he doesn't tell you is that it has been dropping since the recession began, and over the last several months. Instead of .1 or .2 it is .3%. Big deal.
3) The economy will 'recover'. Obama's unemployment rate is remarkably similiar to Reagan - with similiar times and severity of recessions. This time, Reagan was at 8.0%, and Obama is at 8.3%. Of course Reagan bennefited from the fact we still had a functioning economy and governmet employment was no falling.
4) The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy.
5) All the structural problems in the economy remain - loss of manufacturing, trade deficits, inequality.
It couldn't go anywhere but UP. The Bush/Obama 3rd term has so throughly gutted the American economy that we are experiencing a 'dead cat bounce'. The only folks getting rich are still the oligarchs that have captured government for their own self-interest at the expense of Main Street.
Case in point -- wall street financial firms have made more profits in 2 years under obama than the previous 8 years under bush.
big pharma, big insurance, big oil, alternative energy companies are making record profits from getting political largesse from the bush/obama presidency. INdeed, GM is building more cars and plants in China than the US.
thanks to 3 terms of the bush/obama presidency, we have seen the budget deficit rise $trillion ($5/bush - $6/obama) which is a tremendous burden and tax on our kids. Moreover, dr. econ's notion that 1.2 million people quit on the economy and have become wards of the state is nothing to worry about is absurd.
Under the bush/obama presidency, welfare and food stamps recipients have increased to record and alarming levels. coontrary to what the obama drones think, this is indeed a 'big deal'
Wow! dr econ is now touting the Reagan presidency and economics policy since by hiw own definition the bush/obama presidency parallels Reagan's
I don't know how to respond to an obama adherent who now resorts to making parallels with Reagan to support a failing Obama presidency. However, I will point out the facts:
1) Reagan faced unemployment significantly higher than obama, unemployment under Reagan reached the high 10% level. Plus it began to drop without a loss of the work force -- within the Reagan recovery, the labor force actually increased -- not declined.
2) food stamps and welfare participants did not expand to record levels under the Reagan recovery -- these people actually entered the work force instead of dropping out and becoming wards of the state thereby creating a further drag on the economy
3) the Reagan economy was growing at 8% by election time as opposed to the 2% anemic growth of the bush/obama recovery.
nonetheless, Reagan and the democrat congress did not have the political will or wherewithal to balance the budget hence they kicked the can down the road. Of course the deficit levels that Reagan ran up pale in comparison to the dangerous bush/obama deficit increases.
Wow, does dr econ consider 20% interest rates, 10+% unemployment, 5% drop in gdp, gas rationing, gold and oil at record levels adjusted to inflation as rosy + dangerously high, record levels of inflation as 'no failing' ?
Wow, using dr. econ's logic we just print money, mortgage our future and kids standards of living and party on !!??
ANd that stimulus is great at adding millions of jobs --- in china. GM is now building more cars and plants in china than the USA !
No dr. econ -- we bailed out wall street, auto unions, and any other crony based on how effective their lobbyists were at plundering Main street wealth.
how many potential microsoft's, ibm's, edison's, bell's, ford's, et al have we destroyed from lack of capital and labor because the bush/obama presidency bailouted out GM, wall street, big insurance, big alternative energy, big union, et al so they could build plants in places like china and mexico and pay themselves huge bonuses at the expense of Main Street?
In sum, like any credit card abusing teenager, you dont take into account the moral hazard and the opportunity costs that these political bailouts represent on economic reality.
And obama has contributed to this by his utter failure to bring substantive government revenue producing private jobs into the economy by veto of the keystone pipeline.
This pipeline will provide shovel ready jobs that actually generate lower energy prices (if the economy ever recovers) or in the very least significantly helps reduce the trade deficit with China. IN addition, it results in cleaner air since American refineries will separate the oil rather than dirty Chinese refineries.
Of course, it wont address inequality because many union employees building a safer pipeline and their employers will be much better off financially while many American laborers is still on welfare and food stamps.
if you want equality, vote for a fourth bush/obama term and we will soon all be equal in our misery.
People tend to forget that the Reagan recession was engineered by the Fed to lower inflation rates. It wasn't caused by a merging of an outsourced economy. credit taking the place of wage increases, and a bankster engineered collapse of finance.
.----------
Economic recovery is an election year bad joke:
QUOTE: .. More proof that there has been no economic recovery is available from those data series that are unaffected by inflation. If the economy were in fact recovering, these date series would be picking up. Instead, they are flat or declining, as John Williams demonstrates.
For example, according to the government’s own data, payroll employment in December 2011 is less than in 2001. Meanwhile, there has been a decade of population growth. The presstitute media calls the alleged economic recovery a “jobless recovery,” which is a contradiction in terms. There can be no recovery without a growth in employment and consumer income.
Real average weekly earnings (deflated by the government’s CPI-W) have never recovered their 1973 peak. Real median household income (deflated by the government’s CPI-U) has not recovered its 2001 peak and is below the 1969 level. If earnings were deflated by the original methodology instead of by the new substitution-based methodology, the picture would be bleaker.
Consumer confidence shows no recovery and is far below the level of a decade ago
The US economy cannot recover, because the US economy depends on consumer expenditures for more than 70% of its activity. The offshoring of middle class jobs has stopped the rise in middle class income and caused a drop in consumer spending power.
The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan compensated for the absence of US consumer income growth with a policy of easy credit and a policy of driving up home prices with low interest rates. This policy allowed people to refinance their homes and to spend the inflated equity in their homes that Greenspan’s policy created.
In other words, an increase in consumer indebtedness and dissavings drove the economy in the place of the missing growth in consumer incomes.
Today, consumers are too indebted to borrow, and banks are too insolvent to lend. Therefore, there is no possibility of further debt expansion as a substitute for real income growth. An offshored economy is a dead and exhausted economy.
The consequences of a dead economy when the government is wasting trillions of dollars in wars of naked aggression and in bailouts of fraudulent financial institutions is a government budget that can only be financed by printing money.
The consequence of printing money when jobs have been moved offshore is an inflationary depression. This catastrophe could begin to unfold this year or in 2013. If Europe’s problems worsen, flight into dollars could delay sharp rises in US inflation until 2014.
The emperor has no clothes, and sooner or later this will be recognized.
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury
Full article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/01/economic-101/
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease:
So Paul Volcker was a bad guy, too? I don't know much about him, except that he is credited with crushing inflation with the economic consequences that you mentioned, and that he was not reckless like Greenspan and Bernanke. Why did Jimmy Carter appoint this guy?
What an incredibly stupid thing to say.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. I was talking about the change in the economy. The trend toward lower labor force participation rates has been going down for years. Of course this is something to worry about. But it is not a sigificant factor in the recent good news on the economy.
CBO does population adjustment calculations every January. The fact that the working class of America has decreased does not disprove nor discredit the massive job growth we've been seeing- especially in January. No one "dropped out" of the labor force. This was just a standard calculation for population adjustment.
Stop buying into neocon rhetoric, it's unhealthy.
Correct me if I'm not understanding, but it sounds like there are in this case at least two different metrics that BLS is using: one is the standard question, are you employed full-time, if not are you looking for full-time employment? and the other is some sort of broad adjustment calculated based on the population, how many people aged 18-22, 23-50, 50-55 etc. That sounds really "squishy."
When BLS questions you do they ask your age?
Based on the original post I was led to believe that the big jump was in the people who answered "no" to the question "if you're not employed full-time are you looking for full-time employment?"
The LF participation rate started rising in the 70's, as more women went back into the labor force.
It then dropped in 2000, plateued out, then dropped more in the Great Recession.
It dropped a bit more last month.
The numebrs could reflect people giving up looking for work because of the eocnomy, or simply the aging population. I'm too lazy to actually look at the BLS numbers.
Were it not for the GOPimp attack on public workers and their ideological and dogmatic attack on economic stimulus spending, we could easily criticize Obama for timidity and a Reagan style approach to the Bush disaster. Power to Truth continues to bash the wrong side of the power game, and his trolling attempts to get the Progressives to make Obama the enemy instead of dealing with the real ideological forces of power is disgusting. He is a troll with no integrity whatever, and I wait in vain for him to live up to his sobriquet.
Unemployment statistics have been fraudulent for a long time. But, the idea that welfare or other transfers of wealth from the bloat to those in need are not good for the economy even if it were the dole instead of job creation continues in public rhetoric. It is dumb, mean and typical of these cons.
The BLS model for stating unemployent figures is pretty flawed....just as the model for inflation is..
QUOTE: Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment.
The reported January jobs gains are contradicted by other official reports. For example, The January payroll jobs report shows 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing, but according to the recently released 4th quarter GDP, 81% of the reported growth consisted of undesired inventory accumulation. Normally, companies produce for sales not for inventories. Why would manufacturers be hiring people to produce goods for undesired inventories?
Most of the new reported January jobs are in services. The January jobs report has 24,500 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade and 13,100 in transportation and warehousing. However the data shows that inflation-corrected real retail sales are down. Why does it take more people to sell fewer goods?
The BLS reports 21,000 new jobs in construction. However, the housing report says that housing starts dropped more than forecast in December, falling 4.1 percent. Why does it take more construction workers to produce fewer houses? - Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
Full article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/06/do-the-job-numbers-really-add-up/
Unemployment figures and job creation are just as bogus as everything else is about this Administration. A bad election year joke.
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
Right. Let's be more like Communist China.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
Really? You can't distinguish between high inflation caused by an excess of money supply and oil shocks from the the real economy?
Are you an idiot?
The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy
The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy
The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy
The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy
The stimulus and auto bailouts added millions of jobs to the economy
Does it drive you crazy?
Yes, there were so many microsoft's, ibm's, edison's, bell's, ford's,and so many people working before Obama bailed out GM.
God.
Now I know your just a corporate pimp.
I think they changed once under Reagan and once under Clinton
I came across this story looking for something else, this isn't what I relied upon but it might be the same result:
Under-employment at a record high (January 2009)
A growing number of workers seeking full-time jobs were able to find only part-time work. Those working part-time jobs - because they couldn't find full-time work, or their hours had been cut - jumped by 715,000 people to 8 million, the highest since such records were first kept in 1955.
The so-called under-employment rate, which counts those part-time workers as well as those without jobs who have become discouraged and stopped looking for work, rose to a record 13.5% from 12.6%. Calculations for that measure began in January 1994.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/09/news/economy/jobs_december/
The bottom line for Obama is the answer to the question in November 2012: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2009/pdf/pi0109.pdf
Table 2. Personal Income and Its Disposition (Years and Quarters) Page 9/14
Wage and salary disbursements, Private Industries, 2008 $5.286 trillion
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2012/pdf/pi1211.pdf
Table 2. Personal Income and Its Disposition (Years and Quarters) Page 8/13
Wage and salary disbursements, Private Industries, 2011 $5.446 trillion
Total wages paid in the economy are 3% higher than the recession year of 2008 (although this data shows that wages paid were higher in 2008 than they were in 2007... who knows...)
As I have posted elsewhere, while the economic numbers are now the given metric of elections, the actual issues that try our souls and motivate us are about freedom and the empire. We need a recovery of democracy more than we need "jobs," and communities can be organized to deal with economic privation if they recover a sense of their own power and how to participate in it. Rather than get lost in the trolling about unemployment stats and "jobs" created, we need to work on a much greater vision about human dignity and worth.
@chilidog and polycarp
Good posts.
Indeed, the obama administration is simply a continuation of the bush debacle. Indeed, Romney, Gingrich, CLinton, et al are of the same mold too.
While we are approaching the problems facing this nation from different ideological directions, at least we can both agree that both the republican and democrat parties are part of the problem and not the solution.
With some added discussion, I think that the occupy movement and Tea Party can find common ground that would help us remove the oligarchy of republican and democrat party operatives.
Unfortunately, based on a review of the posts on this thread, it appears that there is still a considerable partisan rigidity among many citizens. Amusingly, democrat and republican drones will criticize a specific policy when the opposition is in power, then paradoxically and illogically applaud this same policy when their party is in power.
It is time to remove both parties -- they have played out their usefulness.
And how to do this? If you ignore the Progressives in the Democratic Party and give the Tea Party more credit for authentic populism than they deserve, you can be self-justified in rejecting the duopoly, but not in having a strategy to solve the problem.
I think we may well see a huge political reconfiguration as the proto-Whigs self destruct and leave the Progressives and the DLC without the greater evil organizing force. I wish the lost souls of the Tea Party could see beyond their angst for a lost White Christian America so they could focus on power instead of blaming people of color and atheists for their pain.
Were your posts focused on power instead of discrediting the lesser evil, I would find the discourse elevated and worthwhile. I do not applaud, but I do understand that Obama runs the empire with a lot more class than the Cold Warriors of PNAC. He was elected to that job, not to end it. When we have an electorate demanding the end of empire and the beginning of democracy, Kucinich or his replacement can walk to victory. Obama may be helping build that electorate by demonstrating that we need more than a decent emperor to get what we need. Speak truth to power if you want that handle. Do not get diverted or it will come back at you in hypocrisy. Your criticism of us "drones" is not working.
You got that backwards. We must lead Obama to become a true progressive, instead of bowinig to conservative and libertarian lies like the stuff you pedal.
That makes no sense. The parties are simply reflecting the interests of those that support it. Take away the parties, they will spring back up into something else. In fact, probably for the worse.
Dr. this guy is not worth your time and knoweldge. He is either a troll or a shill because he never takes on power.