The trajectory under President Obama, and all in spite of Republican efforts, from day one of his presidency, to derail any effort to improve economic condition for their own political gain. For eight years of the Bush Reign of Terror the Republicans crapped all over our metaphorical economic house, and every day of Obamaâs administration they screamed, âYouâre not cleaning our mess up fast enough. Put us back in charge.â
And a âTrump trickle downâ would finish creating the oligarchy promoted so well by Dubya Bush.
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Trump could use the Republican formula touted by his new BFF Ayn Ryan:
They always say that unemployment doesnât look as bad because people quit looking for work.
I always question that one. In my experience, people that want to work, do. Ambitious people just fight their way through. It isnât like this was the first economic downturn ever, albeit it was the worst of our lifetimes.
I got married and had babies at the tail end of the Carter years. Construction was dead so I did like 20 different jobs to make money. Most of those I didnât care for but I had no choice. My friends and I would network and get each other hired in different places then move on when that ended.
We never quit looking or trying and eventually we all had steady work, some of my friends stuck with the part time jobs and that became their careers.
Lazy people will always be a thing and claim that they canât find work but this isnât but a mere percentage point of the total.
Hiring may have slowed because so many people have found work and there just isnât near as big a pool to hire from. The unemployed rate dropped, so that just as easily could be a part of it.
Either way, it is no cause for alarm. See the good news for what it is as opposed to the gloom and doom headlines. We are at 4.7% unemployment, that is fricking amazing!
âNearly a half-million unemployed Americans stopped looking for work, and were no longer officially counted as unemployed.â
That doesnât compute. Job growth has been steady for many months. The economy, while not growing strongly, has also been steady. Why would 500,000 people stop looking for work?
I suspect that thereâs been an error here. Look for a major correction when they review the data. (Corrections are made every month. Sometimes they are small, sometimes quite significant.)
The NYT has a gloomy headline in the Breaking News email, yet ends with this:
And after showing signs of life in recent months, wages moved up a steady 0.2 percent for the month and a gain of 2.5 percent for the year.
Mayâs job totals were affected by the more than 35,000 Verizon workers who were on strike and classified as unemployed by the Labor Department. (They returned to work this week.)
âUnderlying job growth is going to be stronger than the overall number says,â Diane Swonk, an independent economist based in Chicago, said before the release of the latest figures. âItâs a little bit deceptive in the weakness.â
Itâs amazing. Things arenât perfect (they never really can be for everybody) but Obama is likely leaving office with the nation in significantly better condition than when he entered. After being tasked with cleaning up the mess that the previous 8 years of a Republican administration had left, his approval rating hovers around 50% in the home stretch of his second term - something not easily achievable in this day and age. Most people who claim to hate him are doing just fine, and may have even benefitted from things heâs done. And they still insist on shitting all over him and blocking him at every turn.
Let us not forget that the talking point of people who have âstopped looking for workâ magically disappears when itâs a Republican in the White House.
Letâs hope we wonât have to test your thesis for a long time âŚ
Iâd rather forget ; )
There wonât be a reason to remember for quite a while and Trump is not a Republican like Sanders is not a Democrat.
A trump Presidency would be an anomaly, there really is no telling what he would cause but I doubt it would be all the positives like Obama has created.
This is why I say to anyone who is struggling that they just need to survive by any means necessary. If itâs a job, fine, good luck and godspeed. If you canât find a job, well, survive.
I probably worded that funny. I was just poking fun at the way conservatives always bring up the âThe low X% unemployment rate isnât the real number because people stopped looking for work, and real unemployment is way higherâ talking point, but then drop it as soon as an ÂŽ gets into office.
Not Obamaâs Fault!
8 Years In
Not Obamaâs Fault!
2% GDP 8 years
Not Obamaâs Fault!
ZIRP 8 years
Not Obamaâs Fault!
QE in the $Trillions
Not Obamaâs Fault!
$20 Trillion Debt
Not Obamaâs Fault!
XXXXXXXXXX
Not Obamaâs Fault!
XXXXXXXXXX
Not Obamaâs Fault!
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Not Obamaâs Fault!
Not Obamaâs Fault!
Not Obamaâs Fault!
Not Obamaâs Fault!
Nope. Sorry. That is, in fact, true. After a year or so of looking for work and being unable to find positions that theyâre qualified for which will give them a career track again, yeah, some people give up for a while. They try to live on their savings, to âride outâ the bad growth period. Sometimes, itâs people saying âscrew this, gonna try my own businessâ. Sometimes, itâs people who have a cushion deciding to go back to school full-time to get a more marketable degree. Sometimes - as with a lot of the folks Iâve known whoâve been there - itâs depression, and they slip into an ever-worsening listless funk.
Actually, discouraged workers currently add 0.3% (itâs the U-4 unemployment measurement).
And itâs not âlazy peopleâ. Sure, some folks are lazy, but thatâs not what theyâre talking about here. In a lot of ways, thereâs a bit of systemic difference between now and the late '70s, too. Itâs counter-intuitive, but we know itâs true: the more interconnected we are, the more isolated a lot of people become. A lot of people who came of age in the 90s and later have very poor interpersonal networking skills, and their social networks are spread across multiple states/countries now, which isnât much help when youâre looking for work and canât uproot your kids to chase it.
Numbers from the BLS indicate that the economy needs to add roughly 120k jobs a month, just to keep up with population growth due to kids growing up and legal immigration. The real number to watch on that page I linked is the U-6. Thatâs the âUnemployed or Underemployedâ number, and itâs currently 9.7%. The U-1 and U-2 have continuing to drop, though, which is a very encouraging sign. People who are continuing to plug away and not get discouraged are eventually finding something (even it if takes 3 months), and once they do, those jobs seem to be lasting longer.
I blame your parents and teachers.
This is an increasingly useless statistic. Iâd like to see the number as it would be calculated by the 60âs parameters. You know, before 50 years of massaging the system.
LOL! So do I! Not my fault!
Come on, 8 years in and the economy is still flying at stall speed. Yeah, Bush this and Bush that but you have to tell me when does it become Obamaâs fault?
For point of referenceâŚ
From 1948-2015, unemployment averaged about 5.8%.
In May, the unemployment rate declined by 0.3 percentage point to 4.7 percent, and
the number of unemployed persons declined by 484,000 to 7.4 million. Both measures had shown little movement from August to April.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.3 percent),
adult women (4.2 percent), Whites (4.1 percent), and Hispanics (5.6 percent) declined in May. The rates for teenagers (16.0 percent), Blacks (8.2 percent), and
Asians (4.1 percent) showed little or no change.
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) declined by 178,000 to 1.9 million in May. These individuals accounted for 25.1 percent of the unemployed. The number of persons unemployed less than 5 weeks decreased by
338,000 to 2.2 million.
The number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs declined by 282,000 over the month to 3.6 million.
In May, the civilian labor force participation rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point to 62.6 percent. The rate has declined by 0.4 percentage point over the
past 2 months, offsetting gains in the first quarter. The employment-population ratio, at 59.7 percent, was unchanged in May.
Funny isnât it that the discouraged percentage is identical to the percentage that unemployment just dropped again.
If people have the wrong skills, is it the economyâs fault? If they choose to get more education and exit the job market for a period of time, that is not an identical representation of being unemployed.
In my original post, I mentioned networking with friends. That was many years prior to the net and/or cell phones but we managed. This is an extremely weak excuse to me and just an excuse. I was taught to make a job of finding a job and we got out the yellow pages, pounded the pavement and went door to door even. Yes, it wouldâve been better to have a steady job with guaranteed income but since that wasnât happening, we constantly chased and found work. I had two children in that time and we did alright. But I was one hell of a persistent young man and I know now that that is what it takes and that I was lucky to be gifted with that drive.
It isnât about me but that is a real example and not just a random number.
Lazy is a real thing, do I have a number for it, no. But the slackers are amongst us and they drag down the good. So even if that isnât the main topic, their numbers are a part of the totals as are the discouraged or truly unemployed.
I know that it isnât all sunshine and roses, but every category is headed in the right direction and the economy is side by side with it.
I like slow and steady as far as the economy goes. The boom/bust cycles are terrible unless youâre on the lucky end.
Constant is what we need, not a bust.
Yes, it was many years prior to the net and/or cell phones. That was kind of my point - your interactions were almost all direct, all the time. I was there, too. You wanted to talk to someone about something back then⌠you went and talked to them. And yes, you were taught to make a job of finding a job - a lot of people who came up in the 90s boom time never needed to learn that skill. It seems ironic, but it comes down to âhaving faced that challenge early, you were better prepared for when it would recur.â
And yes, lazy is definitely a real thing. So are depression and isolation, and yes, people do give up when theyâve been discouraged for extended periods. I spent 2 years unemployed when the tech bubble burst at the end of 2000, and let me tell you, thereâs very little thatâs more discouraging than being told because you are legal, you wonât be hired for the most menial of jobs, paying less than minimum wage, no matter how willing you are. There was literally a stretch of time where I couldnât get hired to dig ditches. I didnât give up - but I know other people who did, in similar situations. One of them gave up on a lot more than finding work, and I still miss him.
Steady is good. Slow is not. Again: 120k/mo just to keep up w/population growth.