“February Payrolls Surge To 295K, Smash Expectations Of 235K, Unemployment Rate Drops To 5.5%”
Everything is great ya all!
But hidden in the report is the fact that a massive 354,000 people left the labor force in February.
and:
“Americans Not In The Labor Force Rise To Record 92.9 Million As Participation Rate Declines Again”
The labor force participation rate hovered between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent in the eleven months from April 2014 through February, and has been 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013.
Prior to that, the last time the rate was below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent, the same rate it was in February.
Oh, can’t forget this:
It has become a running joke: month after month after month, the punditry says wages hikes are coming… they are coming any second, just be patient. And month after month the punditry refuses to accept the simple reason why not even the BLS’ goalseeked data does not permit this long awaited wage surge to take place – simply said, the quality of jobs (or rather “jobs” as these are all merely 1s and 0s that only exist in some BLS spreadsheet) added every month is absolutely atrocious, so bad that not even the BLS’ actuarial tables allow its goalseek program to attribute higher wages to the “jobs” it creates out of thin statistical air.
Ironically moments ago US labor secretary Thomas Perez said that the “quality of jobs is going up.”
No it isn’t, as anyone who spends even two minutes with the BLS report can find out.
Don’t have two minutes? Here is the full breakdown. As the chart below shows, the three biggest single-category jobs added in February (because Professional services includes numerous occupations), were also the three lowest quality, lowest paying ones:
Leisure and Hospitality, added 66K jobs
Education and Health added 54K
Retail trade added 32KTogether these three job categories accounted for 152K jobs, or more than half the total February job gains. They also represent the lowest paid jobs in the US.
But don’t worry, everything is great.
Let’s see what we find in the (relatively uncooked section) of the data.
This raw data looks pretty good; 566,000 jobs, according to the household survey, were added and the change in not-in-labor-force was very close to zero.
But — the annualized change less the workforce addition rate remains tiny — positive, but very small, at only 170,000.
This, unfortunately, means that despite the so-called “headline” unemployment number moving down (strongly!) the population:employment ratio, which is the only figure that matters when it comes to government funding sustainability as you can only tax working people, remains in the ditch.
Keep our heads buried in the sand MSM….that’ll fix everything.
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I find it hard to trust any numbers from the government. They can fudge them any way they want. And they do. I am one f those who finally threw in the towel in trying to find a full-time job. I am living off a small part-time job and what would have been my retirement.
The right ceased having any interest in the unemployment numbers as soon as they started telling an entirely different story than they wanted to sell. Up until that point, they had no problem at all believing them.
@Greg:
As ususal, what you say makes absolutely no sense. Are you stoned again?
As you can see from this chart, we are ”only” 17 years of ”recovery summers,” and we will be back where we were.
But, on paper, if we can only discourage a few million more workers we can be at 0.0% unemployment even sooner!
If Nancy Pelosi is correct, more unemployed people is better for the economy anyway.
Many are just getting to be too old to be considered useful by capitalists
This administration has so destroyed the reporting of just about everything in order to spread its propaganda that these unemployment numbers can no longer be taken seriously, at least by those of us who aren’t part of the flock of sheep that blindly believe everything spewing from their mouths.
Playing loose with the numbers is no surprise. Another lefty, “Uncle Joe” as FDR so fondly called him, claimed that from 1928-1937 the Soviet Union added over 7 million industrial jobs, a number which was later proven to be inflated as were the claims of how much industrial output had increased (Brose, “A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century”, p. 211). But when you have control of, or in Obama’s case the blind backing of, the press the lies are allowed to go on virtually unchallenged. The only challenges come from non-MSM sources hence the reason for the Fairness Doctrine and the desire to control the Internet.
@John:
You should then consider moving out of the country soon. It’s obvious your mind is so old you are already close to useless.
@Greg:
I wonder, Greg, if you can remember what 5.7% unemployment looked like before the recession? The economy was booming and humming. How about 5.7% now? Where I work, the projections for the rest of the year have been extensively scaled back. Is Obama’s 5.7% near total employment as is was before the recession?
Obama’s policies are killing the economy, which may or may not be the goal.
@John:
A fact of life, John. However they, myself included, are approaching retirement with their investments stagnating and the value of their stagnant dollars declining, thanks to Obama’s policy of printing money rather than unleashing the power of a free economy. While people age towards the point where not only are they finding it more difficult to find a job, but they should be enjoying the retirement they have earned… which Obama has wrecked.
@John: Many are just getting to be too old to be considered useful by
capitalistsgovernments.(I fixed that for you.)
Demographically, abortion has destroyed the ethnic European peoples of every European-based country, whether communist (Russia, et al) or socialist (UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, etc.) or of a more free enterprise system (USA).
All of these countries have tried to replace lost taxpayers via immigration of foreign ”workers.”
In Europe Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East and further east were the ”workers” of choice.
Yeah.
They didn’t fill the jobs, they went on the generous dole instead.
They became huge drags on these economies, not saviors of them.
They will eventually inherit those countries but they will only get the empty shells.
Here in the USA Christians were imported as workers.
They work at a higher rate of employment than native-born black Americans, creating resentment.
Race wars are happening on a small scale in America’s bigger cities’ inner poorer communities.
Demographically, Hispanics will overtake black Americans then white Americans eventually.
Will they inherit more than a shell?
Only time will tell.
In addition to reporting sluggish hiring for March, the government revised down its estimate of job gains in February and January by a combined 69,000.
http://news.yahoo.com/pace-us-hiring-weakens-just-126k-jobs-added-123112636–finance.html
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has reported that its forecast for U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) growth dropped to zero on April 1.
On February 2, the GDPNow model forecast GDP growth of 1.9% but that’s been erased.
GDP growth may not actually reach zero in the first quarter of 2015, but there does not appear to be much question that it will end up well below where initial forecasts put it.