The development of the above study figures was prompted by recent media reports that the economy has really turned around. I like many of you have been asking, "Well yes, but as compared to what?" Are we merely talking about the stopped hemorrhaging, or are we talking about returning to a robust economy that is now nearly healed? Are we seeing a return to full employment? If not, how bad is it? I've provided all the numbers I came up with, but I wanted to get fairly traditional reasoned job growth numbers, so starting in 1965 when the figures seemed rather settled, I used figure through ten four year terms to determine what job levels we should be seeing in the United States today.
This is a workup I developed with data found here. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ce At that location I selected total private employment and government employment, and ran the numbers. Once inside the report, I expanded it out to a report from 1939 to the present.
From 1961 through 1964, a rather normal work environment as it relates to job growth took form. Using figures from the jobs report starting in January of 1965 and continuing on every four years through 2001 coinciding with each new or returning administration, I utilized this fairly level ten four year terms of jobs increases. I then calculated the total growth over the ten periods, and developed a reasoned average we have come to expect on a normal basis. The result was a figure slightly over 9.5% per every four years.
Then on the right I plugged in that average growth, and from 1961 on, reflecting first on the 1965 figure, I calculated what we should expect when it comes to jobs held in the United States.
The figures I came up with are not exact, because they don't fluctuate. None the less, they hold pretty darned close through 2001. At that point they were about 734,000 out of 132,548,000 jobs off. Still that's a fairly accurate model to have held up over 40 years, the four year job growth projection from 1961 through 2001. It's off by only 0.55%. The prior four year mark in 1997 is only 0.25 - 0.35% off.
For that reason, I think we can use that average job growth figure to develop a fairly accurate indicator of where our jobs should be today. How many U. S. Citizens should be employed today? If it held up over 40 years, should these growth figures seem reasoned for the following twelve years? I think so.
If you take a look at the figure on the left our government says are employed today, and compare it to what traditional job growth projections say we should have employed today showing on the right, you'll note we're coming up 40 million jobs short.
To put that in perspective, we are employing 77.013% of the people we should be today. 22.987% of our citizens who should have jobs don't. That's nearly one in four people. And when you consider how many of our citizens are under-employed, it's a national disgrace. I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn half our potential workforce is either unemployed or under-employed. As Yakov Smirnov used to say, "America! What a country..."
Moving jobs off-shore, allowing citizens of other nations to come here and take jobs when so many U. S. Citizens are unemployed, to have the highest Corporate tax rates in the world, to actually give tax advantages to corporations that employ people off-shore, and then adding in the impact of Obamacare on all this... our leaders have really worked their magic.
So no, in answer to our reasoned questions, Barack Obama and the Leftist swill have not returned our economy to a healthy status. And no, our Republican cohorts haven't lifted so much as one finger to change that.
And that's the way it is, May 09th, 2013.