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The Economist ominously reports: The struggle to digest the swollen generation of ageing baby-boomers threatens to strangle economic growth. As the nature and scale of the problem become clear, a showdown between the generations may be inevitable. The statistics are frightening: The average federal tax rate for a median American household, including income and payroll taxes, dropped from more than 18% in 1981 to just over 11% in 2011. Yet sensible tax reforms left less revenue for the generous benefits boomers have continued to vote themselves, such as a prescription-drug benefit paired with inadequate premiums. Deficits exploded. Erick Eschker, an...

Prior to World War II and immediately thereafter, most married women in this country worked in their homes raising their children and keeping house. Then during the late 1960s, radical feminists encouraged young women to set aside their traditional family roles as homemakers, helpmates, child nurturers and husband civilizers for something trumpted as much more rewarding. Women were told that being a stay-at-home mom was nothing more than enslavement perpetrated by their male chauvinist husbands. Forget family life and children. Women could be happy and achieve fulfillment by capably competing with men in the workplace for equal jobs with equal...

For the country's 12.8 million unemployed, it may seem like the jobs just aren't out there. The average jobless American is out of work, after all, for nine months. But a somewhat different lament is coming, increasingly, from the employer's end: They can't find good enough people to fill all their open jobs.

Computerworld - MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that they say will enable robots to learn and adapt to humans so they can soon work side-by-side on factory floors. Traditionally, robots working in factories are large, imposing and sectioned off in metal cages as they move heavy loads and perform menial, repetitive tasks. However, Julie Shah, the Boeing Career Development Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said robots can be more than they've been in a manufacturing setting. It's time for robots to begin working more closely with humans, making workers jobs' safer and easier. Shah, in a...

Last month the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development released data showing that college graduates generally do not regret going to college, despite lots of criticism of the value of higher education. Today the center released a new report focusing on the depressing state of America’s recent high school graduates, who seem to agree about the importance of further education.The study reported on a survey of high school graduates of the classes of 2006-11 who do not have college degrees and are not enrolled in school full time. This group overwhelmingly believes that additional education beyond a high school diploma is...

How would you define “unemployment?”  Statistics on unemployment are bandied around in the media all the time.  Changes in these statistics are hailed as good or bad news for the President, with varying degrees of emphasis from the news networks, depending on which party the President belongs to.  But what do these statistics truly measure?Would you define “unemployment” as measuring “people who want a job, but can’t get one?”  This is, broadly speaking, the definition embraced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The trick to making those numbers dance lies in measuring “people who want a job.”  The widely reported...

Now that the unemployment rate seems to be on a steady decline, Republicans have begun rummaging around for less flattering economic indicators they can use to attack President Obama's jobs record during this election year. To mark today's three-year anniversary of the stimulus, the uber-conservative Republican Study Committee blasted out a graph (above) mapping the decline of America's workforce participation rate, which measures the overall percentage of working-age adults who have a job or are searching for one.

- Courtesy of Liberty Works* The following charts track the unemployment rate and the size of the labor force. * The chart above shows that over the first 25 months of the current recovery the unemployment rate has declined from 10.1% to 8.5% while the size of the labor force is virtually unchanged even though the working age population has grown.Since the beginning of 2008 the working age population has grown by 7.2 million people.  Yet the labor force which is normally about two-thirds of the working age population has shrunk over the same period by 49,000.Thus, 4.8 million men...

MADISON — November appears to be another down month for Wisconsin’s workforce, with state employers reportedly shedding an estimated 14,600 jobs. But those preliminary estimates could be off, perhaps significantly, as was the case in October and June, according to revised estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The swings in employment statistics between the inner-monthly data collection is causing some to ask whether the BLS’ estimates are B.S. Disparity The trend has been troubling. Based on BLS data, Wisconsin has recorded five consecutive months of workforce contraction, a point state Rep. Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, jumped on...

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a "pay gap" that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.... The pay gap in the Washington-Baltimore area was calculated at 36.9 percent, slightly below the 38.1 percent reported last year. Officials said a variety of factors could have caused that result, including changes in the mix of jobs and switching thousands of Defense Department employees into the general schedule and out of a separate pay system that is being phased out....

Imagine what would happen if America barged its way into a developing country, buttered up its homicidal dictator and agreed a back-of-the-envelope deal in which he signed over his nation’s mineral wealth in return for roads, railways and sports stadiums. Everyone would benefit, no? No. The problem is that the infrastructure turns out to be worth a hell of a lot less than the minerals. Fortunately, Washington has had the foresight to top up the dictator’s Swiss bank account. Problem solved! As for the mining operation, the Americans really don’t want to be bothered by minimum wages or trade unions....

Take this job and shove it? In August, 2.03 million Americans voluntarily quit their job, the most since November 2008, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey out this week. It’s a sign that employees are becoming more optimistic about finding new work. That optimism is relative, however. Americans aren’t leaving work en masse. Quits are still well below the 3 million or so seen every month before the recession.

Black Unemployment: Highest In 27 Years By Annalyn Censky September 2, 2011 The unemployment rate for blacks surged to 16.7% in August, its highest rate since 1984, the Labor Department reported Friday. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market. Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported. "This month's numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities...

WASHINGTON (AP)—For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor's degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids. Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

Since the beginning of the last recession (December 2007) the private sector workforce has shrunk by 6.6% while shedding more than 7.5 million jobs. Over that same time period, the federal government workforce (excluding Census and Postal workers) has grown by 11.7% while adding 230,000 jobs. This trend has continued throughout the Obama Administration. Since President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the private sector workforce has shrunk by 2.6% while shedding 2.9 million jobs while the federal workforce (excluding Census and Postal workers) has grown by 7% while adding more than 144,000 jobs.

The chart below (found also here), from Big Government contributor Veronique de Rugy clearly shows that federal employment has grown by 98,000 jobs since the start of the recession. This bears repeating, because lefty columnist Paul Krugman is furiously spinning that the increase in employment is due to Census hiring. Krugman: But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all...

The number of people working part-time hours rose by 143,000 in the three months to August to reach 7.96m, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992, the figures by the Office for National Statistics have revealed. Part-time working accounted for 27.3pc of total employment, with the number of people in working rising by 178,000 on the quarter to 29.16m. A record 1.14m employees and self-employed people were working part-time because they could not find a full job, up 65,000 on the quarter, the ONS said.

The regulars down at Sparky’s Diner were at a loss for words, and to be frank, so was I. This past week marked the one-year anniversary of being let go from my place of employment for the past ten years. The gang at Sparky’s never thought my unemployment would last this long. I figured it might take a few months, given my history over the past quarter century. To use a good Texas phrase: this ain’t my first rodeo. I dropped out of the job market in the mid ‘80s to finish my college education when it became painfully apparent...

As a follow-up to my earlier post on employment and stimulus, here’s a chart of what may be the most significant data on the topic. Barack Obama claims that the unemployment rate dropping from 9.7% to 9.5% shows that we’re moving in the right direction economically — but that data doesn’t include those who have left the workforce out of discouragement. They have no jobs and have given up looking for another due to economic conditions, according to the categorization by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This chart shows the direction in which our economic policies have taken the US:(numbers...

Says lower IQ rates will help it deal with smaller U.S. talent poolThe U.S. has arguably been the most desirable place in the world to get a college education with international students from China, India, Japan, and others all traveling to the U.S. with that express purpose. However, there's serious signs of trouble; U.S. citizens' college graduation rates are in danger of falling behind China. Japanese enrollment is down as U.S. universities are slowly falling out of favor. And at least one executive of an Indian firm complained that American graduates were "unemployable". Adding to the list of awkward statistics...