Posted on 02/04/2012 3:10:35 AM PST by Kaslin
Hey folks, good news!
Another 1.2 million people dropped out the workforce, which means that Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) economists can say that unemployment has moved down to 8.3 percent without that messy job-creation thing getting in the way.
That’s been such a bummer for Obama. But now he doesn’t have to worry about his programs actually doing anything, since the invention of the new government BLS math BS to replace the old government BLS math BS makes job creation obsolete. That's just perfect for the Democrats.
Last month when I wrote about the BS the BLS now uses to make unemployment go down, I did the math myself. This time around, I’m letting the folks from ZeroHedge and our contributor Mike Shedlock, do the math for me.
ZeroHedge says that if you add back in the 5 million people who have permanently dropped out the labor force, as reflected in the historical average workforce participations rates, the “implied” unemployment rate is 11.5 percent and rising, not falling.
Workforce participation rates - see chart to right- imply an 11.5 percent unemployment rate, while the "official" BLS rate says unemployment is going down. Typical liberal math.
“It also means that the spread between the reported and implied unemployment rate just soared to a fresh 30 year high of 3.2%,” ZH say. “And that is how with a calculator and just one minute of math, one strips away countless hours of BLS propaganda.”
Last month ZeroHedge reported that the spread between the reported and implied unemployment rate was at 2.9 percent, then “the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.”
Indeed, that’s how the story gets worse from here.
ZeroHedge used the historical workforce participation rates to estimate the workforce, but as our own Mike Shedlock points out, participation rates have declined again “taking out a 1984 low.”
Instead of the historic rate of 65.8 percent participation in the workforce, we are now at 63.7 percent. That means that we are literally years away from replacing jobs that we’ve lost since Obama became president. So many have lost heart looking for work that it’s going to be some time before they become candidates for employment again.
One of the few Wall Street economists who sees this is Lindsey Piegza, of FTN Financial in New York.
“It was a better-than-expected report, the strongest report that we've seen in quite some time,” Piegza told Reuters. “The big question is -- here's the thing: the reason we're seeing the unemployment rate drop is because more and more people are dropping out of the labor force. I know the market wants to rally on this number but remember we need a minimum of 250,000 just to cover demographic change. So we're almost at the place where we need to be to reabsorb the nine million people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession. This pushes the bar even higher for payrolls for the rest of this year. Given that the bar is so low we have to take this in the context that it's still not good enough."
As Piegza and others have pointed out, the 243,000 jobs that were reported aren’t enough to keep up with the number of people joining the labor force, yet alone, those who have lost their jobs.
“People should take it with a grain of salt,” Scott Brown, an economist with Raymond James and Associates of Saint Petersburg, FL, also told Reuters “since they are January figures and subject to revisions. We also had some unusually mild weather.”
In the end what it means is that wages in the US have been permanently reduced by $208 billion per year and counting so far. That’s about 1.5 percent of GDP just in wages, not counting anything that is actually produced by those workers. When you figure in total output subtracted from GDP from missing workers, the number is closer to 2.1 percent of GDP that’s permanently missing from our economy. That’s about $320 billion.
Even the most optimistic projections for Obama’s millionaires’ tax doesn’t come close to raising that amount.
Over the long-term those little variations of 2 percent more or less in GDP growth make a huge difference in our economy. Over a ten-year period an economy that grows by 2 percent versus an economy that grows by 4 percent is the difference between having a GDP of $18.5 trillion versus a GDP of $22.5 trillion by year ten.
In total over ten years, it means that the economy will miss about $20 trillion worth of GDP in those ten years, and between $3.4-$4 trillion in tax revenues unless we start to follow pro-growth policies that lead to job creation for someone other than major Obama donors.
See? And here I ended up doing some math anyway.
That’s just another reason to deny Obama four more years.
Now I have 20 trillion reasons plus one. And so do you.
He wouldn’t take the blame, that’s for sure
Do people on welfare count as unemployed? I don’t believe they are and wonder what the “true” unemployment rate would be if the numbers were accurately reported and compared to historic rates before the “War on Poverty” travesty.
There are also people who are on disability who in decades past would have been unemployed- I know people who are not really sick, but somehow get disability because of what I consider to be just attitude/emotional problems. Though to be fair, I have seen this personally over the last 20+ years. Obama is not the first to play with the numbers, but he appears to be the worst.
Well of course — ya can’t very well justify raising taxes unless you crater the employment picture. Thanks Kaslin.
Bam! BLS will report 0% unemployment! All praise Obama!
This we bill sent to every free market oriented media outlet I can think of. The MSM coverage is ridiculous. They know they’re not telling the full story.
MY only criticism of this report is that it ignores the fact that the population is aging and as a consequence one would expect that the percentage of the population seeking work would decline somewhat, though the drop is pretty dramatic.
Whaaaaaattt???
Will be. Sorry.
I keep thinking about how scared Yossarian was about an upcoming bombing raid, and so he went to the big tactical map at three in the morning and moved the markers indicating US troop positions into the target city.
In the morning, the general saw that the city had been taken and cancelled the raid.
Maybe Obama is studying Catch 22.
By the time November gets here we will have been witness to the greatest economic recovery in recorded history. /s
If they have never been employed can they be counted as unemployed?
If you never previously held a job (and are not eligible for unemployment) such as high school graduates who do not go to college and college graduates, you will not be counted until you get a job and lose it. Just look around and see all the high school and college graduates living at home with no job.
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