[Mad Dawgg]

IIRC we need about 200K jobs per month just to keep up with new people entering the job market. However new people who can’t get a job don’t show up on the unemployment roles so its all good for Obamanomics...!

[jpsb]

Well we have the baby boomers retiring, kind of a budge in the curve. That might account for some of the distortion. The number I recall was 280K new jobs needed to keep unemployment rate stable but that was prior to the baby boomers retiring in mass.

[kabar]

Each month, The Hamilton Project examines the “job gap,” which is the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month. As of June, our nation faces a “jobs gap” of 9.7 million jobs. This chart shows how the jobs gap has evolved since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, and how long it will take to close under different assumptions for job growth. If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until April 2020 to close the jobs gap. Given a more optimistic rate of 321,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate of the best year of job creation in the 1990s, the economy will reach pre-recession employment levels by February 2017.

[cherokee1]

Yeah, there’s that as well as the simple lying fak that as long as the “new hire” number is smaller than the “new file” number there can’t be any possible way the unemployment rate drifts down. It’s not just smoke and mirrors-—more like smoking mirrors.