Saturday, May 5, 2012

April’s jobs: Americans aren’t working

Reuters: By Felix Salmon May 4, 2012

Excerpts:

  • There’s a lot going on in this month’s jobs report. The headline number of jobs created — 115,000 — is miserable: it’s basically just enough to keep up with population growth.
  • the two charts which matter. First you have the number of people not in the labor force, which has been climbing steadily through the recession and the recovery, and is now approaching 90 million. The only time it fell was during the first quarter of 2010 — the census-hiring boom.
  • Then there’s the even scarier one, which is the labor force participation rate — now down to 63.6%.
  • as Dan Alpert noted, in a country of 314 million people, there are only 115 million full-time workers and 27 million part-time workers. It’s really hard to get a robust recovery when the number of people earning money is so anemic.
  • The CBO saw a rate of 64.6% in 2012 — a full percentage point higher than we’re at right now. The participation rate wasn’t expected to fall to today’s level of 63.6% until 2017. [emphasis included]
  • Until the labor force participation rate stops falling and starts rising, the so-called recovery will remain a theoretical economic entity and not a real-world reality for hundreds of millions of Americans. 
Comment:

The recovery is lagging and so is hiring.  Why not look at something obvious and go for that, like energy?  The US spends hundreds of billions on imported oil, why not turn that around and make it an export industry instead?  Not so much oil, as energy products, like energy technology.  Not windmills and solar though, because these do not make enough power that is needed.

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