There is no more manipulated and massaged economic statistics than the unemployment numbers. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:
I’m surprised it took this long, but it’s finally become mainstream thinking to acknowledge that the official unemployment rate is little more than nonsensical propaganda. As the emergence of massive populist movements on both the “right” and the “left” have demonstrated, something ain’t right in the U.S. economy, and everyday people get it.
Bloomberg reports:
Democrats typically cite the current unemployment rate of 4.9 percent as evidence of significant economic improvement since the last recession, but a report this week from the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research says otherwise.
Author and research associate Nick Buffie looked beyond the main jobless rate to more than a half-dozen measures including prime-age employment, labor compensation and the rate at which workers are quitting their jobs. When you factor these in, “the economy is weaker than the unemployment rate says and we haven’t fully recovered from the recession yet,” Buffie says.
In 2007, the year the recession began, the prime-age employment rate — defined as the percentage of Americans age 25 to 54 with a job — was 79.9 percent. The share fell to 74.8 percent in December 2009 and remained low until it began rising two years later, reaching 77.8 percent in June 2016.
Based on these numbers, the labor market has only recovered about three-fifths of the employment lost during the recession, according to Buffie.
Since the unemployment rate peaked in 2009 at 10 percent, about 12.7 million workers have found work, while an additional 11.8 million Americans have given up on their job search altogether. The report suggests that many currently unemployed Americans would resume work if given the opportunity.
The number of so-called “job wanters” — which are prospective workers who wants jobs but haven’t searched for one within the past four weeks — is up 25 percent since 2007. Of those, the number of “marginally attached workers” — defined as a prospective worker who wants a job, is available to work now, and searched for employment within the past year but not the past four weeks — is up 31 percent. There were also 64 percent more “discouraged workers,” or marginally attached workers who had given up looking for work specifically because they didn’t think any jobs were available.
Meanwhile, the AEI came up with a neat little infographic on the subject. Here’s how they introduce it:
More people—but especially men in their prime—are out of work than ever before. Nicholas Eberstadt, America’s leading demographer and political economist, exposes this reality with fresh, detailed demographic data. He concludes that there is a new population of men—beyond the “employed” and “unemployed”—that are “unemployed but not looking for work.” Who are these men? Why are they not looking for work? And how has the welfare state influenced, contributed to, or even exacerbated the reality of this new class of men? “Men Without Work” pays particular attention to this group, presenting a clear, researched look at what all Americans can no longer ignore.
To continue reading: New Report Proves What We Already Knew – The U.S. Economy Sucks
