Nearly At ‘Full Employment’? 10 Reasons Why The Unemployment Numbers Are A Massive Lie

Michael Snyder Freedom Outpost
March 10, 2015

On Friday, we learned that the official “unemployment rate” has fallen to 5.5 percent. Since an unemployment rate of 5 percent is considered to be “full employment” by many economists, many in the mainstream media took this as a sign that the U.S. economy has almost fully “recovered” since the last recession. 

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some Federal Reserve officials believe that “the U.S. economy is already at full employment."  But how can this possibly be?  It certainly does not square with reality.  People that have been struggling with unemployment for years and that still cannot find a decent job. 

So what in the world is going on?  How can the government be telling us that we are nearly at “full employment” when so many people can’t find work?  Could it be possible that the government numbers are misleading?

The official “unemployment rate” (U3) has become so politicized and so manipulated that it is essentially meaningless at this point.  The following are 10 reasons why…

#1 Since February 2008, the size of the U.S. population has grown by 16.8 million people, but the number of full-time jobs has actually decreased by 140,000.


#2 The percentage of working age Americans that have a job right now is still about the same as it was during the depths of the last recession.  Posted below is a chart that shows how the employment-population ratio has changed since the beginning of the decade.  Does this look like a full-blown “employment recovery” to you?…

#3 The primary reason for the decline in the official “unemployment rate” is the fact that the government now considers millions upon millions of long-term unemployed workers to “no longer be in the labor force."  Just check out the following numbers…

The number of Americans participating in the labor force has been on a decline for the past few years. Nearly 33 percent of the Americans above age 16 are not part of the workforce, the highest number since 1978. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report issued recently has found 92,898,000 Americans above age 16 not a part of the labor force of the country as on February 2015. When President Obama took over the office in January 2009, nearly 80,529,000 Americans were not a part of the labor force. The number has increase by nearly 12 million over the last few years.

#4 Over the past couple of years, the labor force participation rate in this country has been hovering near mutli-decade lows…

The labor force participation rate hovered between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent in the eleven months from April 2014 through February, and has been 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013. Prior to that, the last time the rate was below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent, the same rate it was in February.

#5 When you add the number of “officially unemployed” Americans (8.7 million) to the number of Americans “not in the labor force” (92.9 million), you get a grand total of 101.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.  Does that sound like “full employment” to you?

#6 The quality of our jobs continues to decline.  Right now, only 44 percent of U.S. adults are employed for 30 or more hours each week.

#7 Millions upon millions of Americans have been forced to take part-time jobs because that is all they can find, and wages for American workers are at depressingly low levels.  The following numbers come directly from the Social Security Administration…

-39 percent of American workers make less than $20,000 a year.

-52 percent of American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

-63 percent of American workers make less than $40,000 a year.

-72 percent of American workers make less than $50,000 a year.

#8 The average duration of unemployment for an unemployed worker is still about twice as long as it was just prior to the last recession.

#9 Most Americans feel as though the Obama administration has done little to nothing to help the middle class.  Just consider the following poll numbers…

According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, Americans see government policies under the Obama administration as having mostly benefited wealthy people, large corporations and financial institutions.

Seventy-two percent of respondents said government policies have done little or nothing to help the middle class, and 65 percent said they have done nothing to help the poor. Sixty-eight percent said the policies have done nothing to help small businesses.

Meanwhile, 45 percent said the policies have done a “great deal” to help large banks and financial institutions, 38 percent say they have helped large corporations, and 36 percent say they have helped the wealthy.

#10 If the unemployment rate was calculated honestly, we would all be talking about the horrific “unemployment crisis” that we were currently enduring.  According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, the real unemployment rate in the United States right now is above 23%.

U.S. politicians and the corporate mainstream media are attempting to convince us that everything is just fine. But what they are telling us simply does not match the cold, hard reality on the streets.

And since the talking heads on television are proclaiming that we are nearly at “full employment," that just makes millions upon millions of Americans that can’t seem to find work no matter how hard they try feel even worse than they already do.

If jobs are “easy to get," then those that are chronically unemployment must have “something wrong” with them.  That is the message that we are being given.  If the mainstream media says that unemployment has gone way down, then anyone that is still unemployed must be really “lazy," right?

When you are unemployed for an extended period of time, it can really suck the life right out of you.  It can be really tempting to believe that you are viewed as a failure by your family and friends.  And for the government to lie to us like this just makes things even harder.

If you are unemployed and can’t find a job right now, I want you to understand that you are caught in the midst of a long-term downward economic spiral which is going to get a lot worse.

When the government tells you that we are in a “recovery," they are lying to you. And when the government tells you that things are about to get a lot better, they are lying to you.

Source

More Bad News From The Jobs Front

Paul Craig Roberts

The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline this morning reads: “Payroll employment increases by 248,000 in September; unemployment rate declines to 5.9%.”
How can this be? As I reported yesterday, US corporations are investing in buying back their own stocks, not in new business ventures that produce new jobs.

According to the Census Bureau’s Poverty Report, US real median family income has declined to the level of twenty years ago.

Consumer credit and real retail sales are not growing. Construction is limited to rental units. Construction shows 16,000 new jobs, half of which are “specialty trade contractors” or home remodelers.

The payroll jobs report lists 35,300 new jobs in retail trade. How is this possible when J.C. Penny’s, Macy’s, Sears, and the dollar store chains are in trouble and closing stores, and shopping centers are renting space by the day or hour?

At a time when there is a surfeit of office buildings and only 500 new jobs in “heavy and civil engineering construction,” the jobs report says 6,000 new jobs have been created in “architectural and engineering services.” What work are these architects and engineers doing?

The 4,900 computer systems jobs, if they exist, are likely short-term contracts from 6 to 18 months. Those who have the jobs are not employees but “independent contractors.”

The payroll jobs report gives an unusually high number–81,000–of “professional and business services” jobs of which 60,000 are “administrative and waste services,” primarily “temporary help services.”
“Health care and social assistance” accounts for 22,700 of the new jobs, of which 63 percent consist of “ambulatory health care services.”

“Performing arts and spectator sports” gave the economy 7,200 jobs, and 20,400 Americans found employment as waitresses and bartenders.

State governments hired 22,000 people.

Let’s overlook the contribution of the discredited “birth-death model” which overstates on average the monthly payroll jobs by at least 50,000, and let’s ignore the manipulation of seasonal adjustments. Instead, let’s assume the numbers are real. What kind of economy are we looking at?

We are looking at the workforce of a third world country with the vast bulk of the jobs in low-pay domestic service jobs. People working these part-time and independent contractor jobs cannot form a household or obtain a mortgage.

As John Titus, Dave Kranzler and I have shown, these jobs are filled by those aged 55 and over who take the low paying jobs in order to supplement meager retirement incomes. The baby boomers are the only part of the US labor force whose participation rate is rising. Of the claimed new jobs in September, 230,000 or 93 percent were jobs filled by those 55 and older. Employment of Americans of prime working age (25-54) declined by10,000 jobs in September from the August level.

As the US labor force continues its transition from first world to third world, real median family income will continue to decline. Ladders of upward mobility will continue to be dismantled, and income and wealth will continue to concentrate in the pockets of the One Percent. America is truly a country run for the few.

Why Can't the Unemployed Get Off Their Couches? And Eight Other Critical Questions for Americans

Tuesday, 03 June 2014
By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch

Last year eight Americans -- the four Waltons of Walmart fame, the two Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett -- made more money than 3.6 million American minimum-wage workers combined. The median pay for CEOs at America's large corporations rose to $10 million per year, while a typical chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker's salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009. Overall, 1% of Americans own more than a third of the country’s wealth.

As the United States slips from its status as the globe's number one economic power, small numbers of Americans continue to amass staggering amounts of wealth, while simultaneously inequality trends toward historic levels. At what appears to be a critical juncture in our history and the history of inequality in this country, here are nine questions we need to ask about who we are and what will become of us. Let's start with a French economist who has emerged as an important voice on what’s happening in America today.

1) What does Thomas Piketty have to do with the 99%?

French economist Thomas Piketty’s surprise bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is an unlikely beach read, though it’s selling like one. A careful parsing of massive amounts of data distilled into “only” 700 pages, it outlines the economic basis for the 1%-99% divide in the United States. (Conservative critics, of course, disagree.)

Just in case you aren’t yet rock-bottom certain about the reality of that divide, here are some stats: the top 1% of Americans hold 35% of the nation's net worth; the bottom 80%, only 11% percent. The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth that, in global rankings, it falls among the planet’s kleptocracies, not the developed nations that were once its peers. The mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called "Gini," and the higher it is, the more extreme a nation's wealth-inequality. The Gini for the U.S. is 85; for Germany, 77; Canada, 72; and Bangladesh, 64. Nations more unequal than the U.S. include Kazakhstan at 86 and the Ukraine at 90. The African continent tips in at just under 85. Odd company for the self-proclaimed “indispensable nation.”

Piketty shows that such inequality is driven by two complementary forces. By owning more of everything (capital), rich people have a mechanism for getting ever richer than the rest of us, because the rate of return on investment is higher than the rate of economic growth. In other words, money made from investments grows faster than money made from wages. Piketty claims the wealth of the wealthiest Americans is rising at 6%-7% a year, more than three times as fast as the economy the rest of us live in.

At the same time, wages for middle and lower income Americans are sinking, driven by factors also largely under the control of the wealthy. These include the application of new technology to eliminate human jobs, the crushing of unions, and a decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage that more and more Americans depend on for survival.

The short version: A rising tide lifts all yachts.

 

2) So why don't the unemployed/underemployed simply find better jobs?

Another way of phrasing this question is: Why don't we just blame the poor for their plight? Mention unemployment or underemployment and someone will inevitably invoke the old "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" line. If workers don't like retail or minimum-wage jobs, or if they can't find good paying jobs in their area, why don’t they just move? Quit retail or quit Pittsburgh (Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis) and...

Move to where to do what? Our country lost one-third of all decent factory jobs -- almost six million of them -- between 2000 and 2009, and wherever "there" is supposed to be, piles of people are already in line. In addition, many who lost their jobs don't have the means to move or a friend with a couch to sleep on when they get to Colorado. Some have lived for generations in the places where the jobs have disappeared. As for the jobs that are left, what do they pay? One out of four working Americans earn less than $10 per hour. At 25%, the U.S. has the highest percentage of low-wage workers in the developed world. (Canada and Great Britain have 20%, Japan under 15%, and France 11%.)

One in six men, 10.4 million Americans aged 25 to 64, the prime working years, don't have jobs at all, a portion of the male population that has almost tripled in the past four decades. They are neither all lazy nor all unskilled, and at present they await news of the uncharted places in the U.S. where those 10 million unfilled jobs are hidden.

Moving “there” to find better work isn't an option.

3) But aren't there small-scale versions of economic “rebirths” occurring all over America?

Travel through some of the old Rust Belt towns of this country and you’ll quickly notice that “economic rebirth” seems to mean repurposing buildings that once housed factories and shipping depots as bars and boutiques. Abandoned warehouses are now trendy restaurants; a former radiator factory is an artisanal coffee shop. In other words, in a place where a manufacturing plant once employed hundreds of skilled workers at union wages, a handful of part-timers are now serving tapas at minimum wage plus tips.

In Maryland, an ice cream plant that once employed 400 people with benefits and salaries pegged at around $40,000 a year closed its doors in 2012. Under a "rebirth" program, a smaller ice cream packer reopened the place with only 16 jobs at low wages and without benefits. The new operation had 1,600 applicants for those 16 jobs. The area around the ice cream plant once produced airplanes, pipe organs, and leather car seats. No more. There were roughly 14,000 factory jobs in the area in 2000; today, there are 8,000.

General Electric’s Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, employed 23,000 union workers at its peak in 1973. By 2011, the sputtering plant held onto only about 1,800 workers. What was left of the union there agreed to a two-tier wage scale, and today 70% of the jobs are on the lower tier -- at $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be. A full-time worker makes about $28,000 a year before taxes and deductions. The poverty line for a family of four in Kentucky is $23,000. Food stamp benefits are available to people who earn up to 130% of the poverty line, so a full-timer in Kentucky with a family still qualifies. Even if a worker moved to Kentucky and lucked out by landing a job at the plant, standing on your tiptoes with your lips just above sea level is not much of a step up.

Low paying jobs are not a rebirth. 

 

4) Can't people just get off their couches and get back to work?

There are 3.8 million Americans who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. These are the country’s long-term unemployed, as defined by the Department of Labor. Statistically, the longer you are unemployed, the less likely it is that you'll ever find work again. Between 2008 and 2012, only 11% of those unemployed 15 months or more found a full-time job, and research shows that those who do find a job are less likely to retain it. Think of it as a snowball effect: more unemployment creates more unemployable people.

And how hard is it to land even a minimum-wage job? This year, the Ivy League college admissions acceptance rate was 8.9%. Last year, when Walmart opened its first store in Washington, D.C., there were more than 23,000 applications for 600 jobs, which resulted in an acceptance rate of 2.6%, making the big box store about twice as selective as Harvard and five times as choosy as Cornell.

Telling unemployed people to get off their couches (or out of the cars they live in or the shelters where they sleep) and get a job makes as much sense as telling them to go study at Harvard. 

 

5) Why can't former factory workers retrain into new jobs?

Janesville, Wisconsin, had the oldest General Motors car factory in America, one that candidate Obama visited in 2007 and insisted would be there for another 100 years. Two days before Christmas that year and just before Obama's inauguration, the plant closed forever, throwing 5,000 people out of work. This devastated the town, because you either worked in the plant or in a business that depended on people working in the plant. The new president and Congress quickly paid for a two-million-dollar Janesville retraining program, using state community colleges the way the government once used trade schools built to teach new immigrants the skills needed by that Janesville factory a century ago.

This time around, however, those who finished their retraining programs simply became trained unemployables rather than untrained ones. It turned out that having a certificate in “heating and ventilation” did not automatically lead to a job in the field. There were already plenty of people out there with such certificates, never mind actual college degrees. And those who did find work in some field saw their take-home pay drop by 36%. This, it seems, is increasingly typical in twenty-first-century America (though retraining programs have been little studied in recent years).

Manufacturing is dead and the future lies in a high-tech, information-based economy, some say. So why can't former factory workers be trained to do that? Maybe some percentage could, but the U.S. graduated 1,606,000 students with bachelor's degrees in 2014, many of whom already have such skills.

Bottom Line: Jobs create the need for training. Training does not create jobs. 

 

6) Should we cut public assistance and force people into the job market?

At some point in any discussion of jobs, someone will drop the nuclear option: cut federal and state benefits and do away with most public assistance. That'll motivate people to find jobs -- or starve. Unemployment money and food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) encourage people to be lazy. Why should tax dollars be used to give food to people who won't work for it? “If you’re able-bodied, you should be willing to work,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said discussing food stamp cuts.

The problem with such statements is 73% of those enrolled in the country’s major public benefits programs are, in fact, from working families -- just in jobs whose paychecks don’t cover life’s basic necessities. McDonald’s workers alone receive $1.2 billion in federal assistance per year.

Why do so many of the employed need food stamps? It’s not complicated. Workers in the minimum-wage economy often need them simply to survive. All in all, 47 million people get SNAP nationwide because without it they would go hungry.

In Ohio, where I did some of the research for my book Ghosts of Tom Joad, the state pays out benefits on the first of each month. Pay Day, Food Day, Mother’s Day, people call it. SNAP is distributed in the form of an Electronic Bank Transfer card, or EBT, which, recipients will tell you, stands for “Eat Better Tonight.” EBT-friendly stores open early and stay open late on the first of the month because most people are pretty hungry come the Day.

A single person with nothing to her name in the lower 48 states would qualify for no more than $189 a month in SNAP. If she works, her net monthly income is multiplied by .3, and the result is subtracted from the maximum allotment. Less than fifty bucks a week for food isn’t exactly luxury fare. Sure, she can skip a meal if she needs to, and she likely does. However, she may have kids; almost two-thirds of SNAP children live in single-parent households. Twenty percent or more of the child population in 37 states lived in “food insecure households” in 2011, with New Mexico (30.6%) and the District of Columbia (30%) topping the list. And it's not just kids. Households with disabled people account for 16% of SNAP benefits, while 9% go to households with senior citizens.

Almost 22% of American children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2012; for those under age five, it’s more than 25%. Almost 1 in 10 live in extreme poverty.

Our system is trending toward asking kids (and the disabled, and the elderly) to go to hell if they're hungry. Many are already there.

7) Why are Walmart and other businesses opposed to SNAP cuts?

Public benefits are now a huge part of the profits of certain major corporations. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Walmart was oddly blunt about what SNAP cuts could do to its bottom line:

“Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors, and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control. These factors include... changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, [and] changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans.”

How much profit do such businesses make from public assistance? Short answer: big bucks. In one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars -- more than four times the SNAP money spent at farmers' markets nationwide. In two years, Walmart received about half of the one billion dollars in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma. Overall, 18% of all food benefits money is spent at Walmart.

Pepsi, Coke, and the grocery chain Kroger lobbied for food stamps, an indication of how much they rely on the money. The CEO of Kraft admitted that the mac n’ cheese maker opposed food stamp cuts because users were “a big part of our audience.” One-sixth of Kraft’s revenues come from food stamp purchases. Yum Brands, the operator of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, tried to convince lawmakers in several states to allow its restaurants to accept food stamps. Products eligible for SNAP purchases are supposed to be limited to “healthy foods.” Yet lobbying by the soda industry keeps sugary drinks on the approved list, while companies like Coke and Pepsi pull in four billion dollars a year in revenues from SNAP money.

Poverty is big business.

8) Should We Raise the Minimum Wage?

One important reason to raise the minimum wage to a living one is that people who can afford to feed themselves will not need food stamps paid for by taxpayers. Companies who profit off their workers' labor will be forced to pay a fair price for it, and not get by on taxpayer-subsidized low wages. Just as important, people who can afford to feed themselves earn not just money, but self-respect. The connection between working and taking care of yourself and your family has increasingly gone missing in America, creating a society that no longer believes in itself. Rock bottom is a poor foundation for building anything human.

But won't higher wages cause higher prices? The way taxpayers functionally subsidize companies paying low-wages to workers -- essentially ponying up the difference between what McDonald's and its ilk pay and what those workers need to live via SNAP and other benefits -- is a hidden cost squirreled away in plain sight. You're already paying higher prices via higher taxes; you just may not know it.

Even if taxes go down, won't companies pass on their costs? Maybe, but they are unlikely to be significant. For example, if McDonald’s doubled the salaries of its employees to a semi-livable $14.50 an hour, not only would most of them go off public benefits, but so would the company -- and yet a Big Mac would cost just 68 cents more. In general, only about 20% of the money you pay for a Big Mac goes to labor costs. At Walmart, increasing wages to $12 per hour would cost the company only about one percent of its annual sales.

Despite labor costs not being the most significant factor in the way low-wage businesses set their prices, one of the more common objections to raising the minimum wage is that companies, facing higher labor costs, will cut back on jobs. Don’t believe it.

The Los Angeles Economic Round Table concluded that raising the hourly minimum to $15 in that city would generate an additional $9.2 billion in annual sales and create more than 50,000 jobs. A Paychex/IHS survey, which looks at employment in small businesses, found that the state with the highest percentage of annual job growth was Washington, which also has the highest statewide minimum wage in the nation. The area with the highest percentage of annual job growth was San Francisco, the city with the highest minimum wage in the nation. Higher wages do not automatically lead to fewer jobs. Many large grocery chains, including Safeway and Kroger, are unionized and pay well-above-minimum wage. They compete as equals against their non-union rivals, despite the higher wages.

Will employers leave a state if it raises its minimum wage independent of a nationwide hike? Unlikely. Most minimum-wage employers are service businesses that are tied to where their customers are. People are not likely to drive across state lines for a burger. A report on businesses on the Washington-Idaho border at a time when Washington’s minimum wage was nearly three bucks higher than Idaho’s found that the ones in Washington were flourishing.

While some businesses could indeed decide to close or cut back if the minimum wage rose, the net macro gains would be significant. Even a small hike to $10.10 an hour would put some $24 billion a year into workers' hands to spend and lift 900,000 Americans above the poverty line. Consumer spending drives 70% of our economy. More money in the hands of consumers would likely increase the demand for goods and services, creating jobs.

Yes, raise the minimum wage. Double it or more. We can't afford not to.

9) Okay, after the minimum wage is raised, what else can we do?

To end such an article, it’s traditional to suggest reforms, changes, solutions. It is, in fact, especially American to assume that every problem has a "solution." So my instant suggestion: raise the minimum wage. Tomorrow. In a big way. And maybe appoint Thomas Piketty to the board of directors of Walmart.

But while higher wages are good, they are likely only to soften the blows still to come. What if the hyper-rich like being ever more hyper-rich and, with so many new ways to influence and control our political system and the economy, never plan to give up any of their advantages? What if they don't want to share, not even a little more, not when it comes to the minimum wage or anything else?

The striking trend lines of social and economic disparity that have developed over the last 50 years are clearly no accident; nor have disemboweled unions, a deindustrialized America, wages heading for the basement (with profits still on the rise), and the widest gap between rich and poor since the slavery era been the work of the invisible hand. It seems far more likely that a remarkably small but powerful crew wanted it that way, knowing that a nation of fast food workers isn’t heading for the barricades any time soon. Think of it all as a kind of “Game of Thrones” played out over many years. A super-wealthy few have succeeded in defeating all of their rivals -- unions, regulators, the media, honest politicians, environmentalists -- and now are free to do as they wish.

What most likely lies ahead is not a series of satisfying American-style solutions to the economic problems of the 99%, but a boiling frog’s journey into a form of twenty-first-century feudalism in which a wealthy and powerful few live well off the labors of a vast mass of the working poor.

Once upon a time, the original 99% percent, the serfs, worked for whatever their feudal lords allowed them to have. Now, Walmart “associates” do the same. Then, a few artisans lived slightly better, an economic step or two up the feudal ladder. Now, a technocratic class of programmers, teachers, and engineers with shrinking possibilities for upward mobility function similarly amid the declining middle class. Absent a change in America beyond my ability to imagine, that's likely to be my future -- and yours.

Why Did the Unemployment Rate Drop So Much?

by Phil Izzo, Wall Street Journal

The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to 6.3% in April as the overall labor force posted its biggest decline since October. The question for the health of the labor market: Why did all those people drop out?

The jobless rate is calculated by taking the total number of unemployed people and dividing it by everyone in the U.S. who is working or looking for work — what the Labor Department calls the labor force. When both of those numbers decline, even if fewer people got jobs in the month, the unemployment rate falls. Both of those numbers can fall for many reasons, and they’re worrisome to different degrees.

The one that raises the biggest concern is when unemployed people get discouraged with the job market and give up looking for work. Once someone leaves the labor force, it’s much harder for them to eventually find work. Many never return. That was at least part of the reason for the decline in April. The number of workers who said they weren’t looking for work because they were discouraged over job prospects ticked higher. But the number remained below the average for all of last year, and doesn’t come close to accounting for the big drop in the labor force. Meanwhile, the total number of people who moved from unemployed out of the labor force also ticked up last month, but it was very close to the average for 2013, indicating no acceleration.

Another way to look to see if people are giving up is by looking at a broader measure of unemployment, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department. That rate includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find. The rate was 12.3% in April, falling the same 0.4 percentage point that the headline rate declined. When the U-6 is steady and the main rate is falling, it can suggest an underlying weak labor market. But when both are dropping together, it suggests that there might be other broader trends.

So if the labor force didn’t drop this month because of people giving up, what’s going on? One trend weighing on the labor force is people with jobs retiring, and last month there was an increase in the number of employed people who were no longer working or looking for work. That flow was at its highest level since October and the third highest since before the recession.

But that doesn’t explain why there are fewer unemployed people. The number of unemployed can fall because people got jobs, because they dropped out of the labor force, or it can fall just because fewer people decided to start looking for work. In April, one of the reasons the number of unemployed fell is because fewer people came off the sidelines to look for work. The number of people flowing from out of the labor force to unemployed was at its lowest level since 2008. Lots more people than usual decided to stay on the sidelines.

That isn’t a hopeful sign for the economy, as people who otherwise might want work aren’t encouraged enough to come off the sidelines. But it’s also less worrying than people giving up looking for work. Many new entrants to the labor force are younger people who will eventually come in, and are on the sidelines because they can be.

No one should read too much into one month’s moves in the labor force. Much of this month’s changes could be recalibrating after a couple of months of increases in the labor force participation rate, and some of it could be reversed next month. Meanwhile, while the details suggest the trend is worth watching, it’s not likely that this month represents a return to discouraged workers giving up and dropping out of the labor market.

Our irrational, harmful bias against the unemployed

By Peter Cappelli, Washingon Post

The persistent high level of unemployment in the six years since the Great Recession began is fast becoming the defining theme of this generation — and a leadership imperative that can no longer be ignored.

Friday’s news on job growth is good: an increase of 288,000 jobs this past month, bringing the unemployment rate to 6.3 percent, well down from its 30-year peak of 10 percent. The number of discouraged workers who want a job but have given up trying to find one is unchanged, however. When we include those in the mix, we’re still left with about three available candidates for every job vacancy out there.

The three and a half million people who remain “long-term unemployed” — that is, who have been out of work for more than six months — represent more than a third of unemployed workers. This is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Being out of work that long creates many problems, such as a loss of housing or health care, that not only cause hardship for individuals and their families, but also place even more burdens on public and private support systems.

Yet the tools for addressing the long-term unemployment problem are within our grasp. And chief among them is for employers to move past the stigma that the unemployed are somehow less qualified to hold a job. That bias persists in corporate human resources departments, but it is unsupported by evidence.

It’s maddening to see such imaginary fears become real barriers to solving our employment crisis. A field study by Northeastern University economics Ph.D. candidate Rand Ghayad and another led by Kory Kroft at University of Toronto sent out fake resumes to employers. The studies found strong evidence that employers’ willingness to consider applicants dropped like a stone after the candidates had been unemployed for six months. The companies actually preferred candidates with no relevant experience to those with a background in the field but who’d been out of work for a stretch.

Corporate leaders haven’t always viewed unemployment this way. Traditionally when the economy improved and created new jobs, businesses would look to the ranks of the unemployed to fill them. Until the mid-1980s, the term “layoff” actually referred to a temporary job loss — and employers were expected to rehire these workers as soon as the economy turned up again.

But by the 1990s, that stopped happening, and the term became a euphemism for permanent job losses instead. This coincided with the “jobless recoveries” that have accompanied every recession since then.

So if employers are not rehiring from the ranks of the unemployed now, how do they fill new jobs? By hiring from each other. This nonsensical game of musical chairs (I hire your workers, you hire someone else’s, and then they try to hire mine) would seem to be unsustainable. Sooner or later, one might think, employers will start to see the unemployed as a valuable alternative.

But in fact, they haven’t. Vacancies are simply staying open longer as employers wait to find individuals who are willing to move from other companies. And it has become so prevalent for employers to reject unemployed job candidates outright that last year the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission threatened to start investigating these cases.

Why won’t employers take long-term unemployed candidates more seriously? The reason has much to do with simple bias, and little to do with hard evidence.

One myth about the unemployed is that something must be wrong with a person who lost his or her job. The economists Bob Gibbons and Larry Katz found evidence of this when they studied how people who were laid off because their plant closed — an event that clearly wasn’t their fault. They had an easier time getting rehired than those who were laid-off for other reasons.

Meanwhile, the most intense bias against the long-term unemployed seems to be the result of yet another myth: If they were good, someone else would have hired them by now. All it takes is for enough hiring managers to think this same way, and no one would ever get a job.

The final reason for bias against the long-term unemployed is the notion that their skills must have gotten out of date by not working. That might be true for surgeons, whose manual dexterity can decline quickly, or maybe in tech fields where software has advanced to a new generation.

But few jobs are like that. Studies have found that the performance of new hires who had been unemployed for a long time was no different than that of new hires who came directly from jobs elsewhere. In fact, most jobs are so routine that taking a break from them — a sabbatical — is actually a good thing for improving work performance. Ironically, so few employees learn new skills on the job these days that it's much more likely that an unemployed person might have expanded his or her skill set, either by taking classes, mastering new software or learning new marketing techniques in the course of extended unemployment.

Ruling out job candidates because they have been unemployed imposes big costs on both citizens, who remain without jobs and income, and on the economy — not to mention on employers who are losing out on an entire population of talented candidates. There is no justification for doing it. In fact, it’s a form of discrimination.

Responsible business leaders should, at the very minimum, tell their human resource departments to update their hiring policies so they don’t filter applicants based on current employment status. The biggest problem is likely to be overcoming the prejudices of hiring managers, who often have little information about the real predictors of job performance and so rely on these false assumptions that unemployed candidates probably aren't good performers. A simple statement from leadership that this is not the case is often enough to change their approach.

Moreover, corporate leaders should support policy changes that provide tax credits for hiring the long-term unemployed. The credits would incentivize employers to look past their own biases, and would cost the government nothing unless an eligible candidate is hired. I reviewed the research for a group called the National Employer Opportunities Network, and we found that such tax credits are a cheap and ultimately beneficial way to move people off government programs.

Plus, in the process, it may actually increase total employment — and help stop the pointless game of musical chairs that hurts rather than helps everyone.

An overview of the April 2014 jobs report

May 2, 2014


The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on May 2, 2014 that the official seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for April 2014 was 6.3 percent, down from 6.7 percent in March and February, and from 7.5 percent in April 2013.

Total non-farm employment increased by 288,000 during the month of April with seasonal adjustment, but increased by 1,152,000 during the month of April without seasonal adjustment.

The seasonally adjusted total non-farm job creation figure for March 2014 was revised upward to 203,000 from 192,000, and the seasonally adjusted total non-farm job creation figure for February 2014 was revised upward to 222,000 from 197,000. The unadjusted total non-farm job creation figure for March 2014 was revised upward to 944,000 from 941,000, and the unadjusted total non-farm job creation figure for February 2014 was revised downward to 741,000 from 743,000.

Breaking these figures down further, with seasonal adjustment, private sector employment increased by 273,000 during the month of April while government employment increased by 15,000. Without seasonal adjustment, private sector employment increased by 1,109,000 during the month of April while government employment increased by 43,000.

The seasonally adjusted private sector job creation figure for March 2014 was revised upward to 202,000 from 192,000, and the seasonally adjusted private sector job creation figure for February 2014 was revised upward to 201,000 from 188,000. The unadjusted private sector job creation figure for March 2014 was revised upward to 834,000 from 831,000, and the unadjusted private sector job creation figure for February 2014 was revised downward to 307,000 from 315,000.

The seasonally adjusted government job creation figure for March 2014 was revised upward to 1,000 from 0, and the seasonally adjusted government job creation figure for February 2014 was revised upward to 21,000 from 9,000. The unadjusted government job creation figure for March 2014 was not revised from 110,000, and the unadjusted government job creation figure for February 2014 was revised upward to 434,000 from 428,000.

The BLS keeps track of six unemployment rates, which are defined as follows and given without seasonal adjustments:

• U1: Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force. This rate is 3.3 percent for April 2014, down from 3.7 percent for March, 3.6 percent for February, and 4.3 percent for April 2013.
• U2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force. This rate is 3.2 percent for April 2014, down from 3.7 percent for March, 3.9 percent for February, and 3.9 percent for April 2013.
• U3: Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate). This rate is 5.9 percent for April 2014, down from 6.8 percent for March, 7.0 percent for February, and 7.1 percent for April 2013.
• U4: U3 plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers. “Discouraged workers” are those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no jobs are available. This rate is 6.3 percent for April 2014, down from 7.2 percent for March, 7.5 percent for February, and 7.6 percent for April 2013.
• U5: U4 plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. “Marginally attached” workers are those who would like and are able to work, but have not looked for a job recently. This rate is 7.2 percent for April 2014, down from 8.1 percent for March, 8.4 percent for February, and 8.5 percent for April 2013.
• U6: U5 plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. This rate is 11.8 percent for April 2014, down from 12.8 percent for March, 13.1 percent for February, and 13.4 percent for April 2013.

As people who are employed part-time typically work about half as much as people who work full-time, it is useful to consider a "U5½," defined as the arithmetic mean of the U5 and U6 numbers. This measure would thus count people who work part-time but wish to work full-time as "half-employed." This rate is 9.5 percent for April 2014, down from 10.45 percent for March, 10.75 percent for February, and 10.95 percent for April 2013.

The BLS revised the Current Population Survey, which gathers the data needed to determine these rates, in 1994. Among the changes made, the U3 rate was named the new "official" unemployment rate, instead of the U5 rate. This revision also defined "long-term discouraged workers" out of official existence. With the inclusion of long-term discouraged workers, the SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate, which might be considered a "U7" rate, exceeds 23 percent.

The use of the U3 as the official definition exposes some holes in the BLS's thinking, because according to them, the following are true:

• A person who loses a full-time job but spends one hour each week mowing a lawn for pay is considered employed.
• A person who simply expresses interest in having a job is classified as unemployed.
• "Discouraged workers" are not classified as unemployed or even as part of the labor force.
• A sharp decrease in a worker's wages when forced to change jobs is not accounted for.

What this means is that the official unemployment rate can fluctuate because discouraged workers (who are not considered to be part of the labor force in the U3 measurement) who re-enter the labor force will cause the U3 rate to spike. The U3 rate can also dip temporarily when such people find temporary jobs and then lose them a month or two later. It also means that the U3 rate will go down when people give up looking for jobs, as 806,000 people did in April 2014. The labor force participation rate was 62.8 percent for April 2014, down from 63.2 percent for March, 63.0 percent for February, and 63.3 percent for April 2013.

Given the problems with the BLS unemployment rates, are they a useful measurement of how well the economy is performing, a wild guess that cannot be accurate despite the BLS's best efforts, or a deliberate fraud by the government? I report, you decide.

Discouraged Worker Dropouts Rise 783k, 80% Higher Than Nonfarm Payroll Jobs Added

Anthony B. Sanders – George Mason University

 

I was at Cornell University in Ithaca New York giving a presentation on mortgages on Friday when the jobs report was released, so I had to wait to read the report in its entirety. Here is my after-seminar report from Friday while waiting to go to dinner.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 9.75 million Americans that are “unemployed” and there are 92.02 million Americans that are “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 101.77 million working age Americans that do not have a job. Back in April 2000, only 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and only 69.27 million Americans were “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 74.75 million Americans without a job. That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000.
 
However, the banner headline in the media was “288,000 Jobs Added!!” What was NOT in the headlines was that the number of people in the labor force fell by 806,000. In other words, 518,000 more workers LEFT the labor force than joined it in April.

In addition, the Number Of Workers Discouraged Not in Labor Force Searched For Work rose by 783,000 in April. That figure is back to the alleged “end” of the recession (according to the NBER). So, does this mean that the U.S. can announced that the Labor Market’s recession has ended?

No. The following economic indicators have declined since the end of 2008: real median household income, hourly wage growth (YoY), labor force participation rate, and M2 Money Velocity.

The Federal Reserve has attempted to depress interest rates with quantitative easing (balance sheet purchases and zero-interest rate policy), but the labor market is only back to end of recession levels.

According to the Taylor Rule, The Fed should be raising the Fed Funds Rate Target (should be 1.52%, but Fed Funds Target still at 0.25%). The point is for mortgage lenders is that the number of qualified borrowers have been reduced because of the recession and bubble burst and small increases in interest rates are unlikely to have an effect.

And lastly, of course, mortgage purchase applications remain lower than at the “end” of the recession in June 2009. Mortgage borrowers are as discouraged as unemployed workers.

Note: My colleague at University of South Carolina, Jean Helwege, wrote me and said “Maybe it is because of the run-up in the stock market and people can now stop looking for work.” Possibly, but BLS doesn’t ask those questions. What we do know if the mortgage purchase applications and originations remain depressed after the housing and credit bubble burst, and that is correlated with declining wages, real income and the number of discouraged workers.

Anecdotal evidence? I know two kids from Columbus OH whose grandfather gave them both large Trust Funds. They are in their 20s and one doesn’t work and the other dabbles in low paying jobs (part-time). But we don’t know how pervasive that is across the country.

Real jobless rate hits 12.4%, 800,000 leave labor force

Jerome R. Corsi , WND

 

NEW YORK – The Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement that unemployment has dropped from 6.7 percent in March to 6.3 percent in April was partly attributed to some 800,000 workers dropping out of the labor force last month, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.8 percent, a new low for the Obama administration.

After adjusting the BLS unemployment number to what is known as “U-6” – a measure that includes total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total part-time employed for economic reasons – unemployment in April was 12.3 percent.

The amount (not seasonally adjusted) of Americans not in the labor force in April rose to 92,594,000, almost 1 million more than the previous month. In March, 91,630,000 Americans were not in the labor force, which includes an aging population that is continuing to head into retirement.

According to John Williams, an economist known for arguing the government reports manipulate “shadow statistics” of economic data for political purposes, drops in the unemployment rate as reported by the BLS have become virtually meaningless.

“The broad economic outlook has not changed, despite the heavily-distorted numbers that continue to be published by the BLS,” Williams writes in his subscription newsletter on ShadowStats.com. “The unemployment rates have not dropped from peak levels due to a surge in hiring; instead, they generally have dropped because of discouraged workers being eliminated from headline labor-force accounting.”

Williams recreates a ShadowStats alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes “long-term discouraged workers.” In 1994 under the Clinton administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics removed that category from those considered “unemployed” in any of the government’s unemployment measures.

The BLS publishes six levels of unemployment, but only the headline U3 unemployment rate gets the press. The headline number does not count as unemployed the “discouraged” workers who have not looked for work in the past four weeks because they believed no jobs were available.

Discouraged workers

Williams has demonstrated that it takes an expert to truly decipher BLS unemployment statistics.

The U6 unemployment rate is the BLS’s broadest measure. It includes those marginally attached to the labor force and the “under-employed” – those who have accepted part-time jobs though they are looking for full-time employment. Also included are short-term discouraged workers who have not looked for work in the last year because there are no jobs to be found.

Since 1994, however, the long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year, have been excluded from all government data.

Williams calculates his “ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment Rate” by adding to the BLS U6 numbers the long-term discouraged workers.

He argues that his ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment measure most closely mirrors common experience.

“If you were to survey everyone in the country as to whether they were employed or unemployed, without qualification as to when they last looked for a job, the resulting unemployment rate would be close to the ShadowStats estimate,” Williams told WND.

The headline BLS unemployment rate has stayed relatively low because it excludes all discouraged workers, Williams argues.

As the unemployed first become discouraged and then disappear into the long-term discouraged category, they also vanish from inclusion in the headline labor force numbers. Those workers, however, are ready to take a job if one becomes available. They are unemployed and consider themselves to be unemployed, but the government’s popularly followed unemployment reporting ignores them completely.

Below is a more complete unemployment table that includes the seasonally adjusted unemployment percentages for U3 unemployment as well as the same for U6 unemployment, followed by the ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment rate, comparing April 2013 for March and April 2014.

Economy of part-time jobs

In August 2013, the House Ways and Means Committee documented that seven out of every eight new employees under Obama have been part-time employees.

“The headlines citing last week’s jobs report as the lowest unemployment rate in years may have been technically accurate, but they are also reminders that looks can be deceiving,” the House Ways and Means report noted at the time.

“The reality, as you dig into the latest jobs data, reveals that few are finding the full-time work they want and need, and many are forced to accept part-time employment.”

To support the argument, the House Ways and Means Committee produced the following table drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The House Ways and Means Committee linked to an article Associated Press published Aug. 4, 2013, that stated: “So far this year, low-paying industries have provided 61 percent of he nation’s job growth, even though these industries represent just 39 percent of overall U.S. jobs, according to Labor Department numbers analyzed by Moody’s Analytics.”

AP economics writer Paul Wiseman noted part-time work had made up more than 77 percent of the job growth so far that year, with part-time work defined as being less than 25 hours a week.

Appearing on PBS’s “McLaughlin Group” in October 2013, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman said that “88 percent of the jobs that have been created this year (2013) are part-time jobs.”

Jobs increase by 288,000 in April. Unemployment rate falls to 6.3%. But labor force falls sharply

by Meteor Blades for Daily Kos Labor

Calculated Risk

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the economy created a seasonally adjusted 273,000 new private jobs in April, and 15,000 new jobs in the public sector, the best overall gain since January 2012. The consensus of experts surveyed by Bloomberg earlier in the week had put expected new job creation at 215,000. Both full-time and part-time jobs are included in the total. The official unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent, the lowest level since September 2008.

There were a couple of clouds over these significantly improved figures, however. The civilian labor force shed 806,000 people in April, a massive drop after rises in the three-month January-March period of 1.26 million. The employment-population ratio remained steady 58.9 percent. But the labor force participation rate fell to 62.8 percent, a 0.4 percent drop that returned it to its lowest level in 37 years.

The bureau's report always includes an alternative measure, U6. This calculation covers not just Americans with no job, but also those working part time who want full-time positions—the underemployed who are called "part time for economic reasons"—and workers who have looked for jobs in the past 12 months but not in the past four weeks. U6 fell from 12.7 percent in March to 12.3 percent in April. U6 does not include people who have not looked for work in the past 12 months.

Revisions changed the job numbers for February from 197,000 to 222,000 and for March from 192,000 to 203,000. That produced a three-month average of 238,000. At that rate, according to the Hamilton Project's Job Gap calculator, it would take until December 2017 to return to pre-recession employment levels at the same time as absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.

The number of long-term unemployed who have been jobless for 27 weeks or more, fell to 3.5 million, 35.3 percent of all those accounted for who have no work.

The number of officially unemployed Americans fell sharply to 9.8 million. But there are the millions of discouraged workers not included in that count because they have left the workforce.

The payroll services company Automatic Data Processing had reported on Wednesday a seasonally adjusted gain of 220,000 private-sector jobs for April. ADP does not report on public-sector jobs and its estimated growth figures, despite a change in methodology in 2012, frequently aren't a close match with the BLS private-job figures.

Among other news in the April job report:

Demographic breakdown of official (U3) seasonally adjusted jobless rate:

• African American: 11.6 percent
• Latino: 7.3 percent
• Asian (not seasonally adjusted): 5.7 percent
• American Indian (data not collected on monthly basis)
• White: 5.3 percent
• Adult women (20 and older): 5.7 percent
• Adult Men (20 and older): 5.9 percent
• Teenagers (16-19): 19.1 percent

Duration of unemployment:

• Less than five weeks: 2.45 million
• 5 to 14 weeks: 2.35 million
• 15 to 26 weeks: 1.53 million
• 27 weeks and more:  3.45 million

Job gains and losses in selected categories:

• Professional services: + 75,000
• Transportation and warehousing : + 11,300
• Leisure & hospitality: + 28,000
• Information: - 3,000
• Health care: + 27,900
• Retail trade: + 34,500
• Construction: + 32,000
• Manufacturing: + 12,000
• Average weekly manufacturing hours fell 0.2 hours to 40.8 hours.
• Average work week for all employees on non-farm payrolls remained at 34.5 hours.
• Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at $24.31.

Here's what the seasonally adjusted job growth numbers have looked like in March for the previous 10 years.

April 2004: + 249,000
April 2005: + 363,000
April 2006: + 182,000
April 2007: +   78,000
April 2008: -  214,000
April 2009: -  684,000
April 2010: + 251,000
April 2011: + 322,000
April 2012: +   96,000
April 2013: + 203,000
April 2014: + 288,000

For some time now, the Economic Policy Institute has been keeping track of "missing workers." These people "who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. In other words, these are people who would be either working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger. Because jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, these “missing workers” are not reflected in the unemployment rate."

EPI says there are currently 6.2 million of these missing workers. Here are two charts showing its findings:

The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of more than 410,000 business establishments called Current Employment Statistics, and one called the Current Population Survey, which questions 60,000 householders each month. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. It is always calculated on a seasonally adjusted basis determined by a frequently tweaked formula. The BLS report only provides a snapshot of what's happening at a single point in time.

It's important to understand that the jobs-created-last-month-numbers that it reports are not "real." Not because of a conspiracy, but because statisticians apply formulas to the raw data, estimate the number of jobs created by the "birth" and "death" of businesses, and use other filters to fine-tune the numbers. And, always good to remember, in the fine print, they tell us that the actual number of newly created jobs reported is actually plus or minus 100,000.

No Jobs, No Economy, No Prospects For Life

Paul Craig Roberts

Over the decades various administrations, seeking to improve their economic record, monkeyed with economic statistics to the point that the statistics are no longer meaningful.  

According to Friday's (March 7) payroll jobs report, the US economy created 175,000 new jobs in February.  If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'll let you have at a good price. 

Even if 175,000 jobs were created in February--remember now, February was a cold month whose low temperatures are used to explain poor housing and retail sales performance, yet somehow created 40,000 more jobs than needed to keep up with population growth--that is an insufficient amount to drop the unemployment rate.

To see how screwed up US economic statistics are, consider the reported unemployment rate (U.3) of 6.7 percent in comparison with the fact that there are about 6 million Americans who have been unable to find a job and are no longer counted as unemployed. These millions of unemployed are not included in the reported rate of unemployment.

John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the true rate of US unemployment is around 23 percent.  

Rather than examine the issue, the presstitute financial media trumpets the government's propaganda. In America there is no more of a financial media, except for Pam Martens and Nomi Prins, than a print and TV media.

The Economic Policy Institute reports that there are 1,360,000 unemployed men and women under 25, 2,8000,000 unemployed men and women aged 25-54, and 1,640,000 unemployed men and women 55 and over who are not counted as unemployed, because they have been unable to find a job after searching a long time and have given up looking.

Just as "your" government and "your" prostitute media lie to you about Ukraine, Putin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine, NSA, spying, torture, 9/11, Obamacare, and literally everything under the sun, "your" government lies to you about the economy and hides from you the perilous state of your economic existence.  If you are not among the One Percent, you have no future in America.

Let us have a look at the 175,000 claimed jobs. Are these the promised high-paying jobs of the "New Economy" that Washington and its economists pimps guaranteed us would take the place of the offshored manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs?

Afraid not.  In the many years that I have been observing the monthly payroll jobs reports and the BLS's future jobs projections, I have never seen even one of the "New Economy" jobs.  They simply do not exist.  Yet, the economics profession, an extremely deluded collection of morons, still believes in these jobs.

Again--how many times have I reported this same result--here are the jobs of the "New Economy":   

Of the 175,000 jobs claimed, 13,000 are taxpayer-supported government jobs.

Of the 162,000 private sector jobs claimed, a mere 22,000 or 13.6% are goods producing jobs or which 15,000 or 68% are in construction  The other 140,000 are service jobs.

Are these service jobs the promised high-pay "New Economy" jobs?  No, but judge for yourself.  14,800 are jobs in wholesale trade. Food and beverage stores accounted for 12,000 new jobs. The Federal Reserve accounted for 7,800 jobs in order to continue rigging every financial market, thus replacing capitalism with Federal Reserve Central Planning.

Accounting and bookkeeping services (it is tax time) gave the economy a short-lived 15,700 jobs. There were 24,400 temporary help jobs. The old standby, education and health services, delivered 33,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality produced 25,000 jobs of which 21,200 are waitresses and bartenders who live on tips.

This has been the jobs profile of the "world's only superpower" for the entirely of the 21st century. Washington, wallowing in its arrogance and hubris, is unconcerned with its economic base. Washington believes its own propaganda about the (non-existent) recovery and America's economic power.  

Republicans Discover Evidence of Jobs Crisis

By Ezra Klein Feb 6, 2014
Bloomberg


The U.S. has been in a jobs emergency since at least 2008. The cause of the crisis -- too little demand -- isn’t mysterious, and neither are the solutions. We could invest in infrastructure to create construction jobs. We could give tax breaks to employers who hire new workers. We could restore the payroll tax cut to workers so they have more money to spend. We could help state and local governments hire back some of the employees they laid off during the recession. Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic consulting firm, found that the American Jobs Act, which contained many of these policies, would have created 2 million jobs.

But in recent years, these policies have been either blocked or canceled by congressional Republicans. They fought Democrats to scuttle the American Jobs Act and allow the payroll tax break and long-term unemployment benefits to expire. Creating jobs, they argued, was neither feasible nor affordable.

That’s the proper context in which to view this week’s hysteria about Obamacare. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just released updated estimates for the health law. It found that the disastrous rollout last fall put Obamacare behind schedule -- on track to insure 2 million fewer people than projected by the end of 2014. On the other hand, it also found that insurance premiums were about 15 percent lower than projected, and that the law would cost less than previously estimated. It found that the risk corridors designed to safeguard insurance companies from the effects of acquiring too many high-risk customers -- which Republicans have been calling an “insurer bailout” -- will actually yield $8 billion in net payments from insurers to the federal government.

The finding that made the news, however, concerned the Affordable Care Act’s long-term effect on labor supply. In past reports, the CBO has estimated that the law will, on net, lead some people to drop out of the labor market or cut back on their hours because their health insurance is no longer tied to their job. Imagine a 62-year-old who would like to shift to part-time work but can’t because he can’t afford -- or, due to pre-existing conditions, wouldn’t even be sold -- insurance on the individual market. Now, because Obamacare has made that insurance affordable and available, he can -- and will. As a result, his work hours will be (voluntarily) reduced.

Previously, the CBO had estimated this would reduce total hours worked by about 0.5 percent. Now, it estimates the effect at 1.5 percent to 2 percent of hours worked -- a reduction in hours equivalent to more than 2 million full-time jobs.

The CBO was very clear about what this means: “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in business’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment.”

The CBO’s clarity didn’t forestall a festival of motivated misreadings. The conservative Washington Times, for instance, featured this headline: “Obamacare will push 2 million workers out of labor market.” That has the distinction of being not only untrue but also the very opposite of the truth. Workers are choosing to cut back hours -- not being pushed to do so.

Whether this is good or bad depends on your views about human flourishing. Lower labor-force participation is bad for economic growth. On the other hand, the point of life is not for everyone to work every possible hour until they die. Workers should be able to choose to leave their jobs or cut their hours without worrying that their families won’t survive a medical emergency. In addition, as the Urban Institute’s Donald Marron tweeted, “employers will be competing harder for workers,” which will push wages to rise for everyone remaining in the workforce.

In context, the freakout over the CBO estimate is perverse. Is it really the Republican position that we should do nothing - - in fact, cut aid -- for the millions of long-term unemployed, but express shock and terror that employed people will, in a few years, cut back their hours or leave the labor force by choice? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about people desperate to join the workforce, who can’t, than about people voluntarily leaving the workforce, who can?

Some Republicans will say, of course, that they don’t oppose helping the jobless. They just oppose increasing the deficit or increasing taxes to do so. But repealing Obamacare raises the deficit, too! So rather than increasing the deficit to help people who want jobs get them, we would be increasing the deficit to make sure people who want to leave their jobs can’t. That’s insane.

Policies don’t exist in vacuums. By untying the link between employment and health care, the Affordable Care Act reduces the incentive to work. But there are ways to increase incentives to work without making people dependent on their jobs for health insurance. We can help people without taking away their health care.

So here’s a simple proposal. Repeal of the Affordable Care Act would cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few decades because of the law’s spending cuts and new revenue. So instead of repeal, how about if Congress devotes that same amount of money to policies to increase employment now. Republicans could even dictate that all the money flow to targeted tax cuts.

If they are worried about employment rather than scoring points against Obamacare, this should be an easy compromise to strike. Anyone think it will be?