Jobs in Obama's America: A national crisis and disgrace

And yet the country has had 26 consecutive months of job growth.

Also from the article: "Today’s report “provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,”

 

Like most rational Americans, I'd rather concentrate on the positive and build on that. We are slowing working our way out of 8 years of republican policies that lead us to the brink of one of the worst economic climates in our history.

It will take some time.

 

I actually agree with bigtexxx on this one. Labor force participation rate is a much better economic health metric than unemployment, and frankly it's been quite poor the last several years.

Of course, texxx and I disagree wildly on how to bring unemployment down (or labor participation up), but I do believe the administration's been doing a lot of the wrong things.

 

This seems to be a subject you don't quite comprehend or understand.

Here's a simple explanation on the numbers you posted and why it's not really a good idea to use Participation rates as a barometer of the recovery.

Labor Force Participation Is Lower Than It Has Been In 30 Years — Why It Matters And Why It Doesn’t

Among the new employment figures the Labor Department released Friday morning is an obscure one that’s ripe for politicking: the labor force participation rate. It measures the percentage of the population age 16 and above who are actually working. The labor force participation rate fell last month to 63.6 percent, its lowest level since 1981.

In the midst of an economic recovery — albeit a slow one — why would the labor participation rate continue to be hover near four-decade lows?

If you take a long view of the figures, something becomes abundantly clear: there’s a lot more behind the country’s slumping labor force participation rate than today’s weak economy. The real reasons behind the fluctuations in the rate over the past several decades are fascinating, and they raise some of the biggest questions in the field of labor economics.



After climbing steadily for decades U.S. labor force participation plateaued about a decade ago, and began falling.

There’s no single, tidy explanation for what triggered the increase in the first place or why it’s come to an end, but the single clearest factor is that last century women began pouring into the work force — a phenomenon that came to an end in the last decade.

“The women who are going to enter have entered,” says Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. All else being equal that explains why the labor force participation rate would flatten.

Other factors have combined to bring it down. The country’s aging population means we have an aging workforce — and that means a bigger-than-usual segment of the labor force is retiring in large numbers. Compounding that is the fact that large numbers of young working age men are not working. The Chicago Fed explored these trends in greater detail and concluded that the labor force participation rate will continue to decline well into the future.

As Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out, the macroeconomic implications are significant and could point to slow long-run GDP growth and the kinds of “jobless recoveries” that have marked the last two recessions.

“Applying this demographic view to recessions and recoveries suggests that the future recessions with historically typical cyclical behavior will have steeper declines and slower recoveries in output and employment,” conclude economists James Stock and Mark Watson (PDF).

If this is right, and current trends hold, our unemployment rate will remain high for a long time. That’s a scary thought, but as Wolfers noted, it depends on what’s underlying the trends. “If people are making other choices and are happy with those choices, it’s a great thing. But if women want to work and aren’t able to find jobs, it’s terrible.”

The data tell fascinating and important stories, but they aren’t the most telling indicators of the pace of the recovery. The U.S. has a much higher labor force participation rate than many other major economies, including some, like Germany, that weathered the global recession better than we have. The significance lies in broader demographic and policy differences between America and other countries.

“The differences with other countries are primarily women, young people, and old people,” Baker says. “We are pretty much in the middle of the pack in LFP for prime age men (25-55). We have higher rates of LFP for women than southern Europe, equal or lower than northern Europe (nordic countries are highest). For the young, we are very high. Students work in the U.S., they mostly don’t in Europe. This is conscious policy. They have stipend, we expect people to work. The same story applies to older workers. Most other countries have much more early retirement, people often can stop working in their late 50s. That is much rarer here.”

 

Amusing that this is a disgrace, and yet the private sector employment has increased more in the 3 years of the Obama administration than 8 full years of the Bush administration, during which private sector employment dropped by over 600,000. So if job creation is the goal, two lessons we learned from Bush:

1. GOP policies failed miserably at creating private sector jobs
2. Their "solution" to that was the massive expansion of government, which created more than 1.5 million jobs - something the GOP now aggressively opposes

So the GOP now wants to take what didn't work and do more of it, while taking what did work for them and do less of it.

 

We need to ensure this never happens again.

Financial regulation<-

Romney CANNOT be elected if he lets this happen to America again.

 

BTW Texxx I do agree that the unemployment rate is stubbornly high and needs to be addressed. The republican majority in congress needs to come up with a jobs bill. But unfortunately they seem to be doing everything they can to not do anything of substance while holding the majority.

This will change this fall when the Democrats take back the house.

 

Says the guy claiming that looking at ONLY the participation rate tells the whole story.

 

A tired excuse lol ?

Conservative policies crippled this country. This isn't an excuse, this is reality.

I will never understand why there are no sane conservatives who can rationally make their points and criticize the president for his faults, while also praising his strengths.

How do you expect for people to take you seriously, when your bias is so abundantly clear?

 

to be fair to texxx, it does tell more of a complete story than the unemployment rate.

 

Agreed. The financial sector, while necessary to "grease capitalism's wheels," is the one area that should be watched closely because of the catastrophic harm they can do despite producing little in the way of innovation.

Another idea: instead of 99 weeks of unemployment, why not fund infrastructure improvement projects instead? That way we pay people to produce something instead of sitting idle at home.

 

Well it started tanking during bush's last year coincidentally when the economy started tanking.

 

Even if they are sitting idly at home they are still spending money on food, clothes, etc. Government might be better off creating an incentive to hire people. Stop giving federal contracts to companies like IBM which outsource all their jobs. I think infrastructure is great, but it should have a purpose not just building something to build something.

 

It has to be productive work. I'm not saying we should go out and hire people to dig ditches and then hire another set of folks to fill them back up. That's no different from unemployment.

It doesn't matter how profitable private sector companies are or how high their margins are. Companies only hire when they're not concerned about sales, and that's directly related to companies' perception of economic health. There's a chart out there somewhere showing this correlation. I'll see if I can find it.

We can all agree that our infrastructure is aging, and there's plenty of projects that can be funded (city-wide WiFi, high-speed rail). In an environment where private companies are too scared to hire, the government can/should step in and bridge the productivity gap. Instead of just bolstering consumer demand via unemployment, why not boost the economy's productive output as well?

 

Why should I care more about the participation rate than the actual number of jobs created?

 

LOLZ, look how the desperate conservative ignores the other half of the quote from the article that he posted. In cased you missed it:

Also from the article: "Today’s report “provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,”