Free Republic

Our long slide toward economic oblivion continues, and survey after survey has shown that most Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of the U.S. economy. Inflation is out of control, most Americans are getting poorer due to the rapidly rising cost of living, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the commercial real estate market is a giant mess. But employment is supposed to be our bright spot. The Biden administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent and that there are lot of jobs available for those that want them....

Hiring in December was even less than the revised figure for the previous month, when 249,000 jobs were added to the economy in November. The stalled job growth comes as new coronavirus variants continue to sow uncertainty and threaten the post-pandemic economic recovery -- though the data for December was collected in the earlier half of the month, before the full extent of omicron's severity unfolded. The unemployment rate remains heightened compared to the pre-pandemic 3.5% seen in February 2020, indicating the labor market recovery still lags nearly two years into the health crisis. As of last month, employment is...

It doesn't seem all that long ago the media and liberal academia were predicting economic meltdown in the aftermath of Trump's election. Liberal "economist" Paul Krugman, for example, famously predicted after Trump's election, "So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened." Well, the left has been repeatedly proven wrong about Trump and the economy, and once again, it's pure joy to point out how wrong they were. With the latest unemployment statistics in,...

In a stunning development, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just revealed that the US unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 4.6% in November. This is the lowest level since August 2007. Economists were expecting the rate to be unchanged from October’s 4.9%. “The trend in employment growth remains more than strong enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down,” Jim O’Sullivan, of High Frequency Economics, said. Some of this decline was due to the 446,000 Americans that dropped out of the labor force, which brought the labor force participation rate down to 62.7% during the month from 62.8% a month ago....

Actor Isaiah Washington is calling on African-Americans to protest the recent killings of black men by police in a very different way. Washington took to Facebook on Tuesday to suggest that African-Americans across the United States boycott showing up for work on Monday to show that black lives matter in the wake of recent police brutality. "Imagine if every single African American in the United States that was really fed up with being angry, sad and disgusted, would pick ONE DAY to simply 'stay at home' from every single job, work site, sports arena and government office in the United...

The official U.S. unemployment rate is 5.1% -- the lowest in seven years -- but Donald Trump calls that a "joke." On Monday, he claimed he'd seen numbers that show America's real unemployment rate is as high as 42%. How does he arrive at such a wild figure? Trump appears to be looking at the number of American adults not working. Period. Out of about 251 million American adults, roughly 102 million -- or 40.6% -- aren't working. But, of course, there are a lot of reasons people don't work. They could be disabled, in college, at home raising kids...

At Trump Tower, only a few blocks away from the meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump announced his new plan to reform the U.S. tax code. After the main announcement, he took questions from the press. On how his plan would address income inequality: TRUMP: In terms of income inequality, we're going to create a lot of jobs. You know, right now we have a false [unemployment rate] 5.4%, 5.3%, 5.6%, every month it is different. It is such a phony number. Because when people look and look and look and then they...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clearly prides himself in shunning focus-group research. He refuses big campaign donations that he asserts make his opponents beholden to special interests. He seems to target no specific constituency. Many pollsters remain puzzled by Trump’s political appeal. “Republican support for Donald Trump just continues to grow,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth Polling after its August survey, “with no clear sense of who his constituency really is.” Yet a constituency is emerging. Trump’s strongest supporters, roughly a quarter of Republican voters across the polls, are not dissuaded by any increased media scrutiny of their candidate....

Donald Trump Claims The 'Real' Unemployment Rate Is 18%. Here's What Wall Street Says.After Donald Trump announced his latest bid for the presidency, I reached out to get details on Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, and posted that interview on FORBES last week. But for many FORBES readers, the most eye-catching part of the interview wasn’t Trump’s plan for health care. It was what the Trump campaign said about unemployment. “Mr. Trump believes that the real unemployment rate is over 18%, not the reported 5.5%,” a spokesperson told me. Trump’s distrust of the government’s job statistics isn’t new. In July,...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. employers added a solid 223,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent, a seven-year low. But wages failed to budge, and other barometers of the job market paint a mixed picture. The unemployment rate fell from 5.5 percent in May, the Labor Department said Thursday. But the rate fell mostly because many people out of work gave up on their job searches and were no longer counted as unemployed.

It’s not every day you see you see the chairman and CEO of the Gallup polling organization come out and declare the official unemployment rate number is extremely misleading, or, as the headline suggests, “a big lie”: ... There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%....

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...

Everyone who isn't an Obamabot (Paul Krugman) or above the age of 5 knows that the current "official" unemployment rate of 5.9% is bogus. The real number that counts is the labor participation rate which has been shrinking for more than 5 years.Why is the labor force participation rate important? Ken Braun of MLive has very clear explanation: The U.S. “civilian noninstitutional population” - the total count of civilian adults - grew by 217,000 in September, according to the latest jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor. Those new entrants represent immigrants, young people coming of age, military personnel...

11.4 million Americans age 16 and over have left the workforce since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to data released today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In July 2014, there were 92,001,000 Americans, 16 and over, who were classified as “not in the labor force,” meaning they not only did not have a job, but they didn’t actively seek one in the last four weeks. This number has increased by 11,472,000 since January 2009, when the number of Americans not in the labor force was 80,529,000. The number of Americans not in the labor force...

The National Journal, an online arm of the Uniparty’s media propaganda machine, is cautioning Democrats not to get too excited about the possibility of the “economic surge” helping them in November. This begs several questions not the least of which is: What “economic surge” in what country are these morons talking about? The National Journal is obviously practicing “cut and paste” journalism. They are printing Barack Obama’s lies about the economy as if they were true. They don’t bother to do even a cursory search of available data to determine the reliability of the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. These...

The American economy gained steam in April, adding 288,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent, the lowest level since September 2008. After a sharp slowdown in December and January, and a modest improvement since then, economists had been forecasting a healthy gain for April as consumer and business activity rose in tandem with temperatures in many parts of the country. But the good news was tempered by a drop of 806,000 in the number of Americans in the labor force, pushing the labor participation rate down sharply. And despite the fall in joblessness, average hourly earnings did...

There's a dirty little secret buried in the monthly employment data. It's a secret so dark, so exquisitely threatening to the financial media industry that those who reveal it risk being expunged from the community like magicians revealing their tricks. The National Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 192,000 jobs were added to the economy in March. The unemployment rate stayed flat at 6.7%. The participation rate rose to 63.2%. Now the dirty secret: none of that actually matters very much. 1.The number itself is simply impossible to measure with any accuracy ... 2.The unemployment rate is irrelevant. ... 3.No...

The unemployment rate is one of the most consequential numbers shaping our body politic. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most misleading. Today at 8:30 a.m., the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly employment report, as it does at the start of every month. As usual, the announcement was widely covered in the financial and mainstream media—a convenient hook for commentary about the state of the economy, the arc of the recovery and the future of the U.S. The unemployment rate was a central factor in the 2012 presidential election, with President Barack Obama seemingly defying a...

The Labor Department on Friday is expected to report the economy added 120,000 jobs in October, below the 148,000 recorded in September and the trend for months prior. … Adding discouraged adults, who have quit looking for work altogether, and part-timers who want full-time employment, the unemployment rate is 13.6 percent. Even with more full-time positions, the pace of jobs creation is well short of the estimated 360,000 needed each month to lower unemployment to 6 percent over three years. That pace would require GDP growth in the range of 4 percent to 5 percent. … The increased cost and...

The progressive assault on the American way of life continues under Obama and his anti-capitalist cronies. The latest job numbers continues to show their progress in reducing working Americans into full-time serfs of the State, bereft of individual liberty or choice. While the media lapdogs are proclaiming that the recovery is still going strong and that nearly 200,000 jobs were created in July, the real numbers tell a starkly different story. First, the 200,000 jobs doesn't even keep ahead of population growth. Even some liberal economists (which are a rare species) admit that actual recovery is 350,000 to 500,000 new...