Posted on 01/15/2012 2:44:02 PM PST by NaturalBornConservative
The BLS didn't start tracking those not in the labor, by who did or did not want to work, until 1994. However, I just created an (unadjusted) table comparing the Annual Change in the Labor Force from 1947 to 2011. It's interesting to note that aside from the past three years (2009, 2010, and 2011), the last time there was a net decline in the Labor Force was in 1951. However, the decline in 1951 was due to a general decline in the non-Institutional Civilian Population. So that makes Obama's misrepresentation unprecedented. It's outright manipulation.
Here's a link to my spreadsheet, with data pulled directly from the BLS: Civilian Population vs. Labor Force - 1947 to 2011.
It isn’t just the big malls, I haven’t seen a strip mall near me with even a 50% occupancy rate. Every business quarter there seem to be even fewer stores, and NO new ones opening at all.
In Ga., Food Lion is closing over 100 stores in the coming months.
Who knows? According the the World Bank, the average Global labor participation rate was 65% in 2009. So that would imply that an average of 35% are not in the labor force, globally. But whose to say that's the proper ratio. There is no way to quantify that. The ratio is in the 50%'s in some countries, but it was 85% in Uganda in 2009.
I think that when Washington D.C. is borrowing $1.2 Trillion (plus) each year to keep an overly dependent society afloat, our labor participation rate is insufficient. That ought to be self-evident. So what should it be? Higher!
Those are pretty ugly numbers. I wish your spread sheet went back to the great depression so we could get a comparison of this depression to that one. I think its safe to call this a depression at this point.
Thank you!
The BLS data only goes back to 1947, so that’s it. I think the older stats were kept by the Census Bureau, but I’ve seen enough.
Really? You arent’ curious to see if we are currently worse off than the 30s according to jobs data?
I’m curious. Did you make these blog posts when GW Bush’s administration used these rates instead of the “real” figures when reporting the unemployment rate?
I wasn't blogging back then, so no. But I included data during Bush's term in this post, as well as most of my others for comparison, and as you can see, the labor force was increasing even during both recessions.
I am curious, but I have other fish to fry right now.
Here's the Census Data - Colonial Times thru 1957
Here are some unemployment stats from 1929 to 1941.
So unemployment, as a percentage of the labor force, reached an all time high of 24.75% in 1933, but they didn't remove people from the labor force because they quit looking for work after 4 weeks like today. But I'm more interested in the following:
Based on the Census Bureau's Data, which I had to tabulate manually, the only other years that faced declines in the labor force, besides 1951, 2009, 2010, and 2011, were 1943, 1944, and 1945. I used the same methodology as in this post and created a new table here - Civilian Population vs. Labor Force - 1929 to 2011.
The labor force continued to grow from 1930 through 1942. So even during the Great depression, there was no dramatic decline in the labor force like what is being reported by Obama's BLS today.
The declines of the mid-1940's are clearly due to World War II, which borrowed from the civilian labor force, and increased the non-civilian military.
Ok. That’s huge. However, some of the shrinkage of the labor force today is due to old people taking early retirements and some of it is due to the baby boomers taking normal retirements. What you are showing us is how totally screwed we are and will continue to be for awhile to come. You aren’t showing us how much the government is lying to us. The size of the lie is going to be the discrepancy MINUS the retiring of the baby boomers.
Am I right?
Also, to make fair comparisons between different eras of declining labor force...those numbers also need to have retired people removed from the totals.
At least that’s how I’m seeing it right now.
I just had a thought
Is is possible for undocumented workers to skew the data? What about a large change in numbers of undocumented workers from one year to the next?
The labor force includes those who are both employed and unemployed. This has nothing to do with retirees, or immigrants. All you have to focus on is the trend prior to 2009, as compared to the dramatic swing in 2009 and forward. I even went back to 1929 in one of these comments to further prove the point.
Never before in history has the labor force declined, with the exception of 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1951. But these declines in the labor force were caused by actual declines in the non-institutional civilian population.
Yet, the non-institutional civilian population has increased by 5.8 million since the end of 2008, but not one of them has been included in the labor force. So where are they? That is the question.
Well, I was asking because a lot of FReepers like to use the U6 for Obama but were quite content using the govt's U3 stats under Bush.
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