RT NewsAlthough the US unemployment rate has declined, more and more Americans are choosing to opt out of the labor market altogether and no longer even figure in the employment data.
Efforts by the Obama administration to dress up the employment picture are a bit like attempting to stuff a circus elephant into a ballerina costume. As Washington trumpets last month’s drop in the unemployment rate (6.3 percent), it has quietly moved more than 988,000 Americans into the “not participating in the labor force” column.
If you add the current number of Americans without a job (9.75 million) to the number of US citizens not in the labor force (92.02), you come up with 101.77 million working age Americans who do not have work, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Now compare that figure to April 2000, when 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and 69.27 million Americans were not participating in the labor market. The number of Americans 14 years ago without work was 74.75 million. That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000. However Washington wishes to fudge data that is bad news for the Obama administration.
In January 2005, the month that Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the United States was struggling with its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Just 60.6 percent of all working age Americans enjoyed employment of some kind.
Since just 58.9 percent of all working age Americans presently have employment, the US job picture remains in worse condition than it was when Barack Obama entered office.
Michael Snyder, who contributes to The Economic Collapse blog, suggested that the United States “just define every American that is not working as ‘not in the labor force’ and then we can have ‘0.0 percent unemployment.’”
“Then we can all have a giant party and celebrate how wonderful the US economy is.”
The unemployment data comes on the heels of another report, released last week, that 20 percent of all American families in 2013 do not have a single member that is working, according to BLS.
The BLS defines a family as “a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage.”
In 2013, of the estimated 80,445,000 families in the United States, in 20 percent – or 16,127,000— of them none of the members was employed.
Everyone I know is trying desperately and unsuccessfully to enter a labor market that just doesn’t exist.
It’s bad enough when writers willfully use bad grammar, but when they screw up data that is hard to screw up (such as , “In January 2005, the month that Barack Obama was sworn in as president…” when he became president in January 2009, and “If you add the current number of Americans without a job (9.75 million) to the number of US citizens not in the labor force (92.02)…” when it should be (92.02 MILLION)) then I have to stop reading which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the article. But that’s what I get for being a math and English teacher….
Aha… an English teacher. Glad to hear it. It must drive you crazier than it drives me when “professional” journalists expose their literary incompetence.
English is a complex language that’s subject to a lot of changes, dialects, slang, and other perversions, so I never expect or demand the King’s English from laymen, but it’s a real shame when professional journalists can’t construct a sentence properly, or misspell words in this age of computerized spell-checkers.
I know different areas of the country are suffering in different ways. Like when we have an oil downturn here, normally the rest of the country is doing well. Here they are building like crazy, new neighborhoods everywhere, stores all over town, help wanted signs everywhere. It had slowed in the winter, but now, it is really picking up. Now are these jobs decent paying, I do not know. I still cannot figure out who is buying all of these houses, these neighborhoods are filling up fast. People are not moving out of older homes, you can hardly find any for sale in the good neighborhoods. Just crazy to me.
The banks are loaning the money to build the houses. Same bullshit all over again. Low interest and low payments to just about anybody with a pulse. It’s a false economy flag that will end up in disaster. Bankers are the real kings, untouched and unregulated.
The oil provides the false security.
Builders and mortgage companies make the big green, while the banks loan freely until it all comes crashing down.
Derivatives….
This country really has become something else. I mean the leaders of this country, the so called elite aren’t trying to help American families. Nope. They are up there trying to figure out everybody possible way they can exterminate everyone else without making it look too obvious. Their whole economic system is a fraudulent parasite system that sadly a lot of folks fall for. And by the time they figure it out they are left on the side of the road. Just unreal.