Posted on 02/17/2006 6:05:43 AM PST by A. Pole
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don’t know what worry is.
Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The U.S. economy was more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That’s one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration.
Over the past five years, the U.S. economy experienced a net job loss in goods-producing activities. The entire job growth was in service-providing activities—primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.
U.S. manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17 percent of the manufacturing workforce. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.
The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is “the envy of the world.” Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12 percent. Furniture and related products lost 17 percent of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the workforce. Employment in textile mills declined 43 percent. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The workforce in plastics and rubber products declined by 15 percent. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7 percent shrinkage in jobs.
The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized “new economy” never appeared. The information sector lost 17 percent of its jobs, with the telecommunications workforce declining by 25 percent. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4 percent. Computer systems design lost 9 percent of its jobs. Today, there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.
In five years, the U.S. economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them overqualified.
Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the United States awash with unemployment among the highly educated. The low measured rate of unemployment does not include discouraged workers. Labor arbitrage has made the unemployment rate less and less a meaningful indicator. In the past, unemployment resulted mainly from turnover in the labor force and recession. Recoveries pulled people back into jobs. Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off.
Today, the unemployment is permanent, as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage, as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones. Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the U.S. unemployment rate to be between 7 percent and 8.5 percent. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.
Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the United States is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.
They were wrong.
At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for “free market economists,” who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefiting Americans. Where is the benefit when employment in U.S. export industries and import-competitive industries is shrinking? After decades of struggle to regain credibility, free-market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.
No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private-sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private-sector jobs created over the five-year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year’s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau’s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7.9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)
The economics profession has failed America. It touts a meaningless number, while joblessness soars. Lazy journalists at The New York Times simply rewrite the Bush administration’s press releases.
On Feb. 10, the Commerce Department released a record U.S. trade deficit in goods and services for 2005—$726 billion. The U.S. deficit in advanced technology products reached a new high. Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the United States highly dependent on foreign-provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the U.S. economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the United States can balance its trade.
[...]
Good research. This guy is obvious a liberal media hack, not a economist or researcher as he falsely portrays himself.
We're in full employment so they got to be working somewhere. My guess is that got higher paying jobs in the service sector --like Pat Buchanan did.
Say, do you have a link to that super-long Buchanan thread from the other day? I made it to comment #250, and now I've lost it . . . .
Obviously if people are eating at restaurants and drinking at bars it's because Bush sent their jobs to China. Or maybe because they have enough money to go out to eat? Something unemployed people usually can't afford.
You invite the Dutch to come over and fix the New Orleans levee...lol
"The fact is, manufacturing jobs in the entire world are disappearing due to increases in productivity."
Yep, it's called robotics. Why pay 100 workers over ten years at a cost of say 20 million in salary and bennies when you can buy a piece of equipment for 2 million and have one engineers maintain several units.
If the economy tanks, and I think it is going to, Terrorist will have a far far easier environment to attack us with.
We cannot fight terrorist (as) effectively with oil at 80+ a BBL, high interest rates, a devalued dollar, sky high commodities etc etc...
The two linked...
Futher, if the economy tanks, you can bet your best boots that the liberal left will gain further control of government...
Fine, but has production in these area dropped? I guess if you can make the same goods with fewer workers that would be bad because a productivity gain is a bad thing? Or do only countries undergoing saturation bombing during war have large productivity gains?
I've read them more out of curiosity. When I first got out of the Navy back in '97 I went to work for a defense contractor. My boss there put us under a lot of pressure to take classes so the company could bill us at a higher rate. Seems that the goobermint has a labor rate scale that is determined by years of education and not actual qualification. I just looked to see if that was still the case.
If someone is a liberal arts grad with little or no motivation to excel in search of a cushy job with good benefits, little accountability and endless job security; they need look no farther than the local government employment office.
The only real growth industry left in America is government...
And yet we export more than ever. Must be that productivity thingie again.
yeah...
it depends...
if you are retired with a disability, that will go in place of a college education.
My dad has both so it didn't matter. :) He's a GS-13 now and looking forward to retirement.
Although I've seen quite a few get fired in the past 5 years for screwing around on the job. There are some sectors, especially in DOD, that aren't taking any crap anymore. I wish it would spread.
Again I am going to stay a damned dirty contractor :)
That's the one. My favorite comment so far, "By definition about half of population has IQ below average." The irony!
I thought robotics would bring jobs (or at least production) back to the U.S. I've recently been informed otherwise.
But as machines get increasingly good at producing lots of products and the prices of manufactured products decline, the economy needs more people to sell, repair, and provide service for the mountains of stuff produced by machines. Your local ISP is a good example of these new kinds of service companies.
The statistics that PCR quotes are also misleading because he starts right at 1/1/01, which was just after the US economy completed an unsustainable massive tech boom driven by the historical coincidence that the initial internet boom happened at the same time as massive Y2K spending on computers and software. Many of the people who've left the workforce are women who returned home to raise families and people who had enough wealth and retired early. Lower mortgage rates have cut housing payments dramatically and allowed many women to return home while their children are young. I don't know why PCR doesn't tell us all this, because he should know all this stuff. I guess that's why we have the blogosphere now.
That is what my great uncle did during the great depression. I lived on a farm that he got this way. A lot of people hated him because of it, but I loved him because he was very kind to me as a small child.
Please see post 116. I need help refuting anothe PCR attack...lol.
Is PCR a cranky old man?
GOOD GRIEF!!! Slave labor? Immigrants and Indian workers are achieving a standard of living they never dreamed of before. And they earn a wage, they are not forced to do it.
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