--although it's not yet quite what I'd like to call a 'turn-around':
Posted on 07/11/2016 4:07:16 AM PDT by expat_panama
...Obama’s critics on rates of labor-force participation to some degree makes the case for the Obama economy performing better than is widely believed...
... The argument is that assuming rates of participation that prevailed 5, 10 and 15 years ago, the jobless rate would be higher. This statistic is being used to indict the Obama economy, and will similarly be used by Democrats to eviscerate the economy when a Republican is in the White House. Partisans on both sides will miss the point.
Up front, this column is not a defense of President Obama or his economy. His administration’s meddling during what would have been a healthy recession deprived the economy of its natural ability to fix itself on the way to a boom. Recessions are the cleansing cure of labor misuse, foolish investment... ...the Obama economy performing better than is widely believed...
...the Obama economy is underperforming thanks to too much government meddling. This is worth bringing up simply because it’s a safe bet that many Americans are presently hiding their work from government. If so, good. ...
...the U.S. economy could be better than it is today, and with much better job availability. Economic growth is easy, and it’s a function of reducing the tax, regulatory, trade (tariffs on foreign goods), and monetary (unstable money that slows investment) barriers to production. What’s important to remember is that if those barriers are greatly reduced, Americans will become even more productive than they already are. If so, even more will have the luxury of dropping out of the labor force altogether. That’s what people are lucky enough to do in rich countries.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
--although it's not yet quite what I'd like to call a 'turn-around':
Goood morning and welcome to new beginnings Monday! Stock indexes finally punched up above long term ceilings and futures are agog w/ more on the upside. Precious metals are also soaring w/ gold up to $1,359.65 and silver topping $20.49! No econ reports (bulk of that action will be at the end of the week) but at least we got pundits to keep us company:
'Good' Jobs Report Confirms Slowing Economy - Louis Woodhill, RCM
Is Anemic Growth the New Normal? - George Will, Investor's Business Daily
Brace for More Weak Earnings - Ciara Linnane & Tomi Kilgore, MarketWatch
When Hitting Panic Button Didn't Pay for Investors - Peter Hodson, NP
The Shameful Lefty Shakedown of Exxon - Steve Moore, Washington Times
Ryan Produces a Tax Plan to Make U.S. Great Again - Ralph Benko, Forbes
Is the Car Culture In the U.S. Dying? - Robert Samuelson, Washington Post
Hussein changed the definition of a job from full time to part time. Smoke and mirrors as always.
A friend working for an American company in Portugal during the early 1970s described the situation where Portuguese were streaming back into the country from the deteriorating African colonies (which were subsequently lost). To deal with this influx, many jobs were literally split in two - many people were working part-time due to the high unemployment that would result otherwise.
We are living through the same thing right now...
Actually it looks like the “employment-population ratio” went down. The officially unemployed are counted in the “participation rate.”
What a fool. If a drop in labor participation rate was really due to American productivity, we would not have a huge trade deficit. The trade deficit is proof that we are selling off our assets or simply handing funny money to our trading partners rather than producing so much that fewer people need to work.
Bread and Circus on borrowed money
I think the author misses a few things:
1. Much of our “prosperity” is being purchased with borrowed money. Right now the $$ being borrowed is cheap, at close to Zero interest. That may not always be the case, though the Powers-that-Be will certainly move Heaven and Earth to keep it that way. Why? Because it is the only way the Entitlement State survives.
2. The Left wants work force participation to be low. That just means there are more people dependent on the Government, which is good news for them. The last time time Democratic Party actually cared about the “working man” was sometime in the 1970s.
On the flip side, automation, robotics and intelligent software IS eliminating a lot of jobs. That trend will continue. I kind of doubt that those eliminated jobs will be replaced by other, better jobs. Even high tech jobs will be reduced—IT can be automated too. I think most future jobs will involve some kind of human-to-human interaction (which can’t readily be automated) and many of them will be low paid.
if Unemployment is around 5%, Then why do we need to keep borrowing billions?
Cat bounce.
I don’t believe it....it is just the next set of statistics to be corrupted by this administration.
That may be what all the mindless union thugs say but it's just a dumb lie.
Sure, we always find ways to make our work more efficient and people always lose their jobs --but it's not the one that's causing the other and we'd lose a lot more jobs if we outlawed factory efficiency. Many years ago when I began engineering almost all the work I did then is now being done by computers --that are all now all built and programmed by engineers like me. More people working and a lot more getting done.
Since the employment figures are imprecise and much manipulated, a 0.1% uptick means nuts.
The collapse in the Labor Force Participation Rate is partly driven by the demographics of aging, partly by a stagnant economy, and partly by the presence of illegal aliens working...illegally.
But the author of the article misses the corrosive effect of Uniparti-onomics. Heavily taxing a few mega producers plus borrowing from abroad to finance handouts so that large percentages do not work, is not sustainable, and perverts democracy. The non-workers for the most part are dependents living off the public dole, not millionaires in early retirement. Dependent people are subjects and should not have a say in government. That leaves a narrow elite to rule. Much better to have a prosperous, educated middle class pay a reasonable amount of taxes, have balanced budgets, and a much smaller proportion of the genuinely dependent. Government policies have produced the opposite, because government types prefer to rule, not be ruled.
Your “borrowed money” point is a good, but the real key is your second point on govenrnment dependency.
The author’s hypothesis has some rational basis - I’ve always wondered how we could have such poor labor participation, yet avoid the horrors of the Great Depression, and part of that is just pervasive government assistance in what’s become more than a “safety net”, on its way to a “safety hammock”. Consider just folks on disability assistance - if I recall correctly, that number has just about doubled under Obama. Surely there hasn’t been some sudden epidemic of work-related injuries - people are gaming the system, to the detriment of the economy as a whole, and the regime could care less.
And that should be the root concern of the increasingly poor worker participation rate - work not only boosts the economy at the macro level, it’s necessary for self-esteem at the individual level. I’m convinced that the skyrocketing suicide rate among working age white males is tied in to the lack of meaningful jobs in this economy. I’d be curious to see what’s happened to the divorce rate under Obama - again, a male who can’t find a decent job isn’t going to have much in the way of self-respect in his own family.
And to top it off we have a running background of deteriorating race relations (egged on by the scum in this regime) to further depress the populace.
--and when the Fed weather service says you're getting a huricane you go out and picnic and when Fed guard at the gov't bldg asks for an ID you walk right by and when the Fed court tells you're getting 3 years it's just more gov't numbers to ignore...
That's the easy thought, what a lot of us are getting is that there's a lot of unvarnished precision at the BLS --and the real problem is too much. Like the unemployment rate: the true % not-working of the labor force is really just 5% and we got to deal with it. We also need to know that the number just doesn't tell us what it used to and we got lots of other numbers we can look at.
...the article misses... ...taxing ... ...plus borrowing from abroad to finance handouts... ...not sustainable, and perverts democracy.
My fault. It was there but I had to take it out for the 300 word limit the FR is held to.
It’s only going to go back up if the GOP shuts off the welfare spigot. And we all know they don’t have the spine for THAT!
Well, I think it’s true and I’m not a mindless Union thug. Many good-paying jobs ARE being eliminated by automation and replaced by lower paying ones (if at all). It is a well documented trend. Also, don’t misunderstand: I am also not saying this is a bad thing, but it is inevitable.
I am in the software/IT field. While our area has certainly grown, tools that make us more productive (& enhance collaboration) will also, eventually, cost jobs. In the cyber security world, a lot of the monitoring that used to be done by people is now automated. I honestly think that 20 years from now, a lot of software will be automatically generated or functionality will be learned from observation or data. Again, not bad, just inevitable.
Yeah, that is the other side of the equation. If you make people obsolete, they feel useless, which makes them even more dysfunctional. It’s a vicious circle.
On the borrowed $$ thing. The $$ isn’t even really borrowed in the traditional sense. It is created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. Then it is lent to banks, which lend it back to the Government—at a marginally higher (but still low) interest rate.
One problem this causes is that it results in an inability to price Capital efficiently. This problem no doubt negatively impacts the Economy, but you rarely hear the Talking-Heads address it. I would guess that it helps the Big Banks and Crony Capitalists.
The other problem with this approach is that it robs savers of their interest. This is increasingly a problem for me and many others. So, we have less $$ to spend. But no one cares about us, as we are old-ish, White people who tend NOT to riot.
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