and the Andrea Mitchell Golden Kneepads award this week goes to... Josh Boak !!!
Posted on 11/08/2014 9:32:08 AM PST by Olog-hai
The unemployment rate no longer seems to reflect America’s mood.
Friday’s strong jobs report showed that the jobless rate—the most closely watched gauge of the economy’s health—is down to 5.8 percent. A year ago, the rate was 7.2 percent. Five years ago, it was 10 percent.
It’s the kind of sustained decline that would normally suggest a satisfied public. Not so much anymore. […]
Many Americans don’t feel they've benefited from falling unemployment any more than they have from a sustained rise in the stock market or from solid U.S. economic growth.
Some hints of their discontent can be found within an otherwise glowing jobs report for October: Wages that are barely growing and a stubbornly low proportion of adults who either have a job or are looking for one. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Remember how AP was celebrating unemployment under Bush when it actually was incredibly low?
(Independents+Republicans>Democrats)=Democrats Lose
I’ve been there. Keep going, sending out resumes every day. Something will happen. I don’t understand these people that stop looking.
and the Andrea Mitchell Golden Kneepads award this week goes to... Josh Boak !!!
Look, too, at the percentage of adults either working or searching for work. It's a measure called labor force participation. The government counts people without jobs as unemployed only if they're seeking work. If more people stop looking, labor force participation falls.At 62.8 percent, the U.S. participation rate hasn't budged over the past 12 months. And it's down a sharp 3.6 percentage points from 2007. That means a lower proportion of Americans are engaged in the job market and benefiting from the economic upswing.
Some of the decline in participation stems from retirements by the oldest of the vast baby boom generation. But not all.
Mandel reasons that much of the decline is due to people who want to work but are no longer actively searching. As long as a large such pool of potential workers exists, it will put downward pressure on wages.
Since 2007, the participation rate has fallen disproportionately in three critical states where Democratic incumbents lost Tuesday, costing their party control of the Senate: Arkansas (-5.9 percentage points), Colorado (-5.3 points) and North Carolina (-4.7 points), each of which will now be represented in the Senate by a Republican.
The bolded section is the argument that undercuts the Dems' new meme that stagnant wages are due to big business being a bunch of meanies who won't share the wealth.
I do not like that the media sells the lie that people HAVE stopped looking.
That’s true. I assume that there are a good percentage of people that are looking, but simply aren’t added to the statistic because they don’t receive a check from the government.
Exactly.
The day the RAT party took control of congress in 2007 it was under 5%, in closer to true numbers than now.
Not happy with it? Maybe because it is not real. Check the labor force participation rate - lowest it has been set to in decades. They have simply summarily dropped a couple million people from the workforce - to artificially bring down the reported unemployment rate. Put those people back in the equation and the real unemployment rate is over 11%. So yeah, there are a lot of unhappy out of work people. Even more that are now working part time at one or more jobs thanks to obamacare. Businesses aren’t hiring full-time where they’d have to provide health insurance that meets obamacare restrictions. So they hire multiple part time instead. This also artificially lowers the apparent unemployment rate. I personally know of a dozen or so people working multiple part time jobs. They don’t get employer backed health insurance. But now thanks to obamacare they have to buy it on their own or get fined. They are twice screwed-over by obamacare and the liberals.
When you consider that most of these jobs are not full-time, but part-time, this is not anything to be happy about. Boehner said the other day that we’ll get the 40 hour work week back, and if that happens, that will make a huge difference. Otherwise these new jobs are probably people picking up a 2nd and 3rd job to make ends meet. People forced to work 2-3 jobs to support their families is not good for the family, which is already at a crisis point. To make it worse, it is engineered this way to destroy the family, which the Alinskyites are all for.
The government useless economic statistics have entered an event horizon.
No-one will believe any of them ever again—and any media outlet that continues to parrot them has become useless noise.
Remember when unemployment under Bush was low, but they complained that they were all just “McJobs”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.