Perhaps we should be happy that the Washington Post has finally noticed that the labor force has rapidly eroded during the so-called recovery in the Barack Obama presidency, but they still seem to have trouble with the data. Friday’s jobs report for March 2013, with its below-population-growth level of 88,000 jobs added and the exodus of 496,000 more workers from the labor force shocked everyone out of the post-election complacency, and the Post sends out a long-overdue APB:
Put out an all-points bulletin: Millions of Americans have gone missing from the workforce.
Every month that those would-be workers are gone raises the odds that they might never come back, dimming the prospects for future economic growth. …
The Labor Department reported that the U.S. labor force — everyone who has a job or is looking for one — shrank by 500,000 people in March. That brought the civilian labor force participation rate to 63.3 percent in March, its lowest level since May 1979. And it left the workforce several million members smaller than the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it should be, given the nation’s demographics.
So far, so good — except that the Post tries to sell this as a decade-long trend:
The vanishing trend is more than a decade old, but it accelerated during the Great Recession. Throughout 2012, economists held out hope that it had stopped. But then came Friday’s jobs report, and hopes were dashed.
There’s so much false information in that paragraph that even the “the” and the “but” are suspect. For the record, here is the actual decade-long trend from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the official record-keeper of this metric:
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