Saturday, July 7, 2012

America’s Labor Market Depression Continues; Stagnation Nation

James Pethokoukis, columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute has written a great piece to review & visualize today's BLS unemployment report. Beyond the raw data, charts & statistics is the waste of human capital caused by the Marxist/Socialist regime of Barack Obama. Only until he & his ideologies are extinguished, can the Nation rekindle economic growth & prosperity for all. The political & economic tyranny must end.


The comparisons to previous recoveries reveal this one does not even come close, with or without Obama's 'recovery' plan, with our less than 2% growth. Our country's malaise can be summed up in one sentence from Ludwig von Mises:
It is not capitalism which is responsible for the evils of permanent mass unemployment, but the policy which paralyses its working. ~Socialism
While Obama asks for more time, he only wants to further weaken the economy & dispirit the Nation. His time in office is coming due, he is responsible for his actions & policies that has brought nothing to the working people of the Nation. Only his friends & cronies have benefited from his regime's policies. Here are some excerpts & another graph from Pethokoukis:

"This continues to be the longest streak — 41 months — of unemployment of 8% or higher since the Great Depression. And recall that back in 2009, Team Obama predicted that if Congress passed its $800 billion stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would be around 5.6% today.

Just 75,000 jobs were created, on average, per month in the second quarter vs. 226,000 in the first quarter. And for the year, monthly job creation has averaged just 150,000 vs. 153,000 last year. Both numbers are extremely weak.

But those top-line numbers actually overstate the health of the labor market.

– If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7% then vs. 63.8% today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. Even if you take into account that the LFP should be declining as America ages, the unemployment rate would be 10.5%. [vs. today's 8.2%; emphasis in original]

***

The average duration of unemployment ticked up to 39.9 weeks.
***
– Job growth during the three-year Obama recovery has averaged just 75,000 a month for a total of 2.7 million. During the first three years of the Reagan Recovery, job growth averaged 273,000 a month for a total of 9.8 million. If you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the Reagan Recovery averaged 360,000 jobs a month for a three-year total of 13 million jobs.
***
The U.S. work force remains shrunken with just 58.6% employed."
It is obviously futile to attempt to eliminate unemployment by embarking upon a program of public works that would otherwise not have been undertaken. The necessary resources for such projects must be withdrawn by taxes or loans from the application they would otherwise have found. Unemployment in one industry can, in this way, be mitigated only to the extent that it is increased in another.  Ludwig von Mises ~Liberalism 
That pretty well sums up the failed economic policies of Barack Obama.It's Keynesian economics at its worst. It's time for a real change, a change back to good, old fashioned free market capitalism.


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11 comments:

Ohio JOE said...

While this is a sad situation, you have written a great article Lionhead.

Machtyn said...

Agreed. Thanks, LH. I have to wonder, if they had not extended unemployment benefits out to 2 years, would the unemployment number have been lower? The problem is that those people who would have dropped off, would not have dropped back into the employment pool, but into disability or welfare.

Anonymous said...

Ohio Joe, Machtyn, thanks for your comments. I think the economy & jobs is the premier issue in this campaign. Folks that are unemployed are going to have to choose what they have now, the nanny state, or get back to work by supporting Romney through his economic policies. The folks that have dropped off the unemployment benefits have extended benefits to help them, but if those benefits weren't there, they would increase their effort to find work. The extended benefits encourages them to stay in the nanny state & vote for the purveyors of it. It's a glaring example of how Socialism kills people's desire for improvement from the inside out. It saddens me greatly.

Machtyn said...

Right now, the Labor Force Participation Rate is at 58.6%. Way too close to more than half the people not working.

BOSMAN said...

Mac,

"Right now, the Labor Force Participation Rate is at 58.6%. Way too close to more than half the people not working."

Related to that, I've got a post coming out tomorrow ("Disability Epidemic")that's sure to inspire.

BTW LH, ABSOLUTELY GREAT POST!

Welcome back!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Bosman, I'd like to add one more chart to this post. Can I add it? The GM article is coming soon. There are many 'nuggets' to mine now.

At 58.6% there's very little margin of error until there's more that are unemployed. Either we get growth going, or we're headed to you know what. Time for massive voter registration drives of employed voters.

BOSMAN said...

Sure you can edit your post. Add/subtract..whatever.

It doesn't change the original link so you don't need to worry.

Anonymous said...

OK, I have an addition here & an incredible chart on the economy under obama for a new post. I just about fell off the chair Bosman!

kelly said...

Thank you for this information.

We need to do everything possible to get Romney in and Obama out of the White House.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure those employment numbers don't include all the start-at-home moms like me who "have never worked a day in our lives." We certainly don't know anything about the economy since we are too rich to care. I certainly haven't noticed that we had a paycut this year and that my college kids haven't landed jobs yet this summer. Or that gas is so expensive we went closer to home this year for vacation than we had planned.

Americans should not excuse the major stomping on the private sector this administration has done. Time for real change. Romney 2012!

AZ

Anonymous said...

Stay-at-home, lol. Stupid phone!

AZ