The Real Employment Situation January 7, 2013
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
Ace has a post up on the 3.3 million people who have fallen off the BLS’s statistics, by being so discouraged that they’re not even counted as part of the labor force anymore. At IB, we noticed this effect back in June 2009, where the labor losses tracked by the BLS were being dwarfed by the losses they didn’t track, rendering the unemployment statistics useless.
This is one of the reasons why I’ve started plotting full-time employment divided by the civilian non-institutional population – it gives you an idea of how jobs are doing compared to the number of adult mouths to feed. I think it provides real insight into how the American people are doing, and to how much they’ve benefited from the Obama administration’s policies.
As you can see, they’ve benefited very little:
You may recall that last Friday the BLS reported that unemployment went up 0.1 points, but in fact this chart shows a slight uptick last month, saying that last month was the best month we’ve had in over 3 years. But we still haven’t recovered to when Obama took office, let alone to anywhere near historical levels of full-time employment.
It takes a lot of work to suppress the American economy for this long. Unfortunately we have a President who’s more than up to that task.
Fundamentally transformin’ n all. Sigh.
That steep dropoff that Obama made a permanent feature?
I expect to see another one just like is as more people are placed in less-than-30-hour-weeks because of ObamaCare.
For two weeks now raw year-over-year unemployment claims were almost 5 percent higher than the same week a year ago, but the year-over-year seasonally adjusted figure came in 11 percent lower.
Any idea how the Obama Admin is ”adjusting” those numbers?
A story about it is here:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2013/01/24/second-week-row-press-says-jobless-claims-fall-5-year-low-actual-year-ov