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

Not if the goal is, you know, to create jobs. There's nothing inherently good or bad about higher or lower labor force participation rates so it seems silly to use that as an absolute measure of anything.

 

Why participate?

 

I completely agree, to get the complete picture you need many metrics. This is one of the problems I have with politics and politicians, they like to look for data points and comment on extremes rather than considering data sets and commenting on trends.

 

How so? Unemployment rate at least tries to identify the portion of people who are unemployed who want jobs. The participation rate just assumes everyone who's of working age should want jobs. As an example, men have been steadily leaving the workforce for 60 years (blue line):



But without looking at the reasons for that, it doesn't remotely tell a complete story. In fact, unlike unemployment rate which at least tells us *something*, this tells us very little at all.

 

I like how the downward trend begins right when Bush was elected, lol.

 

Buzz words used by republicans against Obama:

"disgrace", "not presidential", "foreign", "socialist", "polarizing", "extremist", "shameful", "Hussein", "muslim" .........

Just take any headline, take 2-3 of the above works, plug them in and you have a headline.

For example: Obama to have dinner with wife.
turns into

Disgraced Hussein Obama polarizes nation with shameful dinner with extremist wife

Bingo!

 

They should have an automated generator online, for speedy and consistent embellishment.

 

Some more info --

Economy Has Recovered All Private Sector Jobs Lost Since Obama Took Office

Michael Linden, the Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As of April, there are now more private sector jobs in the United States than there were in January 2009, when President Obama took office. You read that right. We have now replaced all of the private sector jobs lost while Obama has been president. And that was no mean feat, given that over the course of 2009, the private sector shed about 4.2 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the news is not nearly so good when it comes to the public sector, where there are currently 607,000 fewer people working than there were when President Obama took office.

The chart below tells the whole story. Under President Obama, the private sector has experienced a relatively robust recovery, and is now back to where it started when he took office. The public sector continues to shed jobs, and as a result, the overall jobs picture in the US remains weak. If you want to understand why conservative efforts to slash funding for teachers, firefighters, cops is bad for the economy, look no further than this graph.

 

The biggest issue I have with the official unemployment rate is that people who haven't looked for work in the past month are automatically removed from the labor force. I suppose there are underemployment or discouraged-worker statistics we can look at, but I personally like looking at labor force participation rate for short-term trends.

Saying that labor force participation is currently X% in and of itself is kind of meaningless. However, saying that it's changed by some Y% is an indicator of how the job market has diminished or grown, especially in the short term. Just my two cents...

 

Participation rate tells more of a story than unemployment rate (in the short term at least), mainly because unemployment flows consist of discouraged workers/people who leave the labour force. Participation rate is affected by this as well, but to a lesser extent because it is a variable over a population, rather than a subset sample (those deemed to be "looking for work").

You get a better picture of a recovery or recession in the short run because you stem the flows added or removed thanks to labour force classification, a difficult and arbitrary art.

I actually prefer the employment-population ratio as it gets rid of this problem altogether. Of course, one can use all three to get the best picture possible.

 

If only the population entering the workforce hadn't increased during that time.

 

Should we blame Obama for that too?

Personally, when I look at this graph, my first thought isn't "Obama".
That's even assuming that labor force participation is the best way to measure unemployment, which it isn't, not by a long shot.

That aside, as a voter there's one thing that makes me feel very sure about which party can better be trusted with the stewardship of the economy right now. The absolutely needless attempt last summer to force America to default on its debts set the recovery way back, and it cost a lot of people their jobs. So as disappointed as we might be in the recovery so far, we should keep in mind that it's been accomplished despite the majority party in the House actively working to derail it.

 

for job creation not keeping up with population growth? sure

 

I take it you would agree he didn't push hard enough for additional fiscal stimulus?

 

Now I'm no mathematician, but the graph you posted shows roughly a 2.5% decrease since Obama took office.

Seems more like a falling spork from the data you have posted, although the accompanying alarmist text does show a fascinating inability of critical thinking.

Why do you want the country to fail? Why do you hate America?

 

Thinking out loud here:

What if Obama doesn't get re-eleted (I know, hard to imagine with all the vulnerables we now have)...and Romney wins. A year after Romney takes office things start doing real good. Would it be because of Obama's work/plan he laid out?

What if things start doing real bad. Even worse than it is now....can we blame it on Obama?

 

You have an incredible nerve, bigtexxx. You voted for GWB twice.

 

The way to answer that is to ask business CEOs why they feel more confident to start hiring again. That's as close to an accurate answer as you'll get. If Romney doesn't pass any legislation regarding the economy then it would be hard to give him any credit.

 

Because effective demand is higher?