Karl Denninger:
The gushing over the employment report was enough to make me retch, and the fact that utterly nobody called anyone on it is even worse.
The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November, the strongest month of hiring since January 2012, while the unemployment rate held at 5.8%, the Labor Department said Friday. The stronger-than-expected hiring figure puts the economy on track to post the strongest year of job creation in 15 years. Economists called the report “a blockbuster” and “surprising and encouraging.” Some economists suggested the report was so strong the Federal Reserve may consider starting to raise short-term interest rates sooner than previously expected. Here are more reactions from economists.
Really?
Is the number in the second column (November) higher or lower than that in the first (October)?
Those are the actual numbers reported from the household survey.
The economy “added” 321,000 jobs in November? No, the BLS added about 600,000 jobs to the number actually reported by households!
If you’re willing to simply “report” whatever is on the headline of a data release without bothering to read the ****ing thing first you’re not a journalist, you’re a shill or worse, a paid spammer.
If you’re willing to believe this sort of **** without reading the report first then you’re a low-information voter and deserve what you get when your view of the economy and the world around you turns out to be 180 degrees from reality.
Yes, on the numbers this is still positive on an annualized basis due to the positive number last month — a month that is normally negative. But this month was negative on the household survey, and quite-strongly so, implying that this was simply an oscillation last month and not a trend.
It is really hard for some to get their heads around the trends.
This is another way of looking at it:
Dec 2014 Jobs Report – Not So Great as Everybody Thinks
Note that the long-term trend is slowly upward with a downturn this last report!
Most of the lies and distortions are coming from the political right and from right-wing media outlets, which are becoming increasingly desperate to maintain the absurdly negative perception of the Obama administration they’ve built up in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. With elections less than 2 years away, there are more leaks in dam than they’re going to be able to keep their fingers in.
This AP article summarizes the good and not-so-good economic news in a far more even-handed fashion:
Job Gains Put US on Pace for Best Growth Since ’99
The good news is that U.S. job growth is the strongest it has been in nearly 15 years. The bad news is that wages are stagnant, and many workers are earning less now than they did before the recession. With the GDP up, profits high, and the stock market at the highest point in history, who should be blamed for that? It pretty much as to be a matter of how all the gains are being distributed, doesn’t it? Why aren’t wages higher?
Rachel Maddow laid out the facts and figures on the Rachel Maddow show yesterday: Don’t look now, US economy booming! The conclusion she draws is hard to argue with, if you keep to the facts and ignore the b.s. and spin. The American economy simply does better during Democratic administrations.
Over the next 2 years, republicans are going to have to deal with a lot of inconvenient information: The economy really has recovered; unemployment really is falling and job growth really is accelerating; the American manufacturing sector is expanding again; inflation is low; millions more have health insurance, and premiums are not skyrocketing as a result; conventional domestic energy production is way up; gasoline prices are dropping and might actually approach the $2/per gallon mark in the foreseeable future; green energy has not been a bust, in spite of that; the stock market is doing very well, indeed.
How will the GOP be able to reconcile such increasingly obvious facts with their tall tale that the Obama administration is a miserable failure and the nation is going to hell in a handbag? The truth of the matter is that the economic turn-around and recovery that we’ve had on Obama’s watch will be a very hard act to follow. It’s also going to be very difficult for the GOP to take credit for it, since they’ve contributed nothing but angry resistance the entire way. And then there’s the big question they really dread: If the economy is so much stronger, why aren’t more of the benefits of that being seen by average Americans?
Remember Obama needing that $890 Billion stimulus so we could build infrastructure?
Then he laughed at us for believing his shovel-ready bullshit.
Now, he’s back at it.
Speaking before an audience of chief executives at the Business Roundtable’s Washington headquarters, Obama was campaigning for greater spending to repair and upgrade our nation’s infrastructure.
I guess he wants others to do what he refused to do back in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.
But he took all the money to do it, so that money is gone now.
@Greg: 92 million out of the work force and the economy is booming
And to think the scam artists at Enron went to jail for fabricating about how well the company was doing when it wasn’t. This administration practices it on a daily basis. Lenin and Stalin did the same thing. They fabricated how well the Soviets were doing when they weren’t. The neo-Marxists running this administration learned well from their predecessors. Unfortunately for them, the internet they so desperately want to regulate provides an avenue to expose their fabrications.
@another+vet#5 Great truth to the Government lie!
Are there 91 million Americans ‘on the sidelines’ looking for work?
Only in Rep. Diane Black’s imagination. Somebody should send her a pocket calculator. And possibly simplified instructions on how to push the buttons to make it perform simple arithmetic.
Stay-at-home parents. Like mother’s who forego a job to raise the children. Retired people would be those who have most often already spent most of a lifetime working.
@FAITH7: As long as the drones who make up the collective keep believing them, they’ll keep spewing their lies. Another question, if the economy has added all of these wonderful jobs and is just booming, why haven’t we seen a corresponding decrease in the number of Americans on food stamps? According the regime, the unemployment rate has decreased a little over 40% since the end of 2009 going from 10.2% to 5.8%. Look at the number of those on food stamps. It has increased 15% over the same time period. If the jobs were so great and the economy is booming, we would have seen a decrease in those receiving food stamps over the same time period. Perhaps this is “progress” in the minds of the leftists. The more people on food stamps, the more dependency on the government which results in more control of the people. Karl, Frederich, Vlad, and Joe would be damn proud of their contemporaries.
http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/pd/15SNAPpartPP.pdf
What sort of problem might be indicated by the fact that a single-parent household with the head of the household working full-time can be earning so little that the family still needs and qualifies for food stamps? Do you think that’s a made up scenario?
We’ve gone over this dishonsety by the BLS before. Labor Participation includes those who are jobless ie. unemployed but still receiving unemployment, and considers those “actively looking for jobs” both as being “participating in the labor force.” That clearly doesn’t mean everyone “participating” has a job, only that they are “participating.” You have to undestand how these dishonest beaurocrats are gathering their data and what the data really means to get the full picture. Only workforce “eligible” individuals are included in the formula (underage, retired, and disabled are not included). 62.8% is the “participation rate.” 100 – 62.8 = 37.2% non-participating are eligible and capable to be part of the workforce, but either their unemployment ran out, they gave up looking for jobs, they are looking but are not included because they are not using government services in their employment search, or they are eligible to work, but aren’t looking for a job.
The BLS’s “non-participation rate” is nearly the same as it was a year ago. How anyone can claim that the situation has “improved”, is insulting to those who understand how the BLS arrives at it’s misleading statistics and who (unlike Greg) can actually do the math and know what the numbers represent, as well as to the vast numbers of our unemployed citizens who are no better off this year than they were a year ago. During height of “the Great depression” the labor participation rate was 75.25% while the non-participation rate was 24.75%. The 24.75% non-participatinion in the labor force in 1933 is a much better situation, than we have in 2014 with a 37.2% non-participation rate.
But of course, as long as the stock market is trading strong, wealthy Washington D.C. and Wall street progressive establishmentarians, and their paid parrots in the MSM continue in profiteering on the disparity, caring nothing about the poor masses who can not find jobs, much less at living wages. Instead, these cold crony pseudo-capitalists want to allow even more undocumentated workers into the mix, to compete for the limited job numbers and keep depressed the wages of America’s workforce.
@Ditto, #10:
In 1933 the average life expectancy for a male in the U.S. was 61.7 years; for a female it was 65.1 years. There was a significantly lower non-participation rate in 1933 because the percentage of retired people was much lower; people tended to die shortly after they stopped working, if they didn’t actually drop over in the harness.
@Greg:
Wrong as usual Greg. Life expectancy and retirement has nothing to dso with it. Retired individuals and dead people are not included at all in the BLS Participation/Non-Participation rate. The BLS makes that quite clear if you bothered to read their criteria.
Of course increasing life expectancy and retirement have something to do with it.
By 2012, the average life expectancy in the U.S. had been lengthened to over 78 years. That’s nearly 15 years longer than the average person lived in 1933. That means that a much larger percentage of the U.S. population are living many more years beyond their point of retirement. This increases the percentage of the total population who are no longer part of the workforce.
This has become even more significant during the years of the Obama presidency because the post-World War 2 Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age in rapidly increasing numbers. Hardly any were during the Bush presidency. (Add 62 years plus nine months to 1945, the year the Second World War ended. The beginning of the retirement surge coincided with the Obama’s first year in office.)
@Greg:
The BLS doesn’t see it that way. It is immaterial to their formulas, and thus has no effect on the BLS Labor Participation and Non-participation Rates. All the BLS formulas are concerned with are (according to their specific criteria):
(1) How many people are currently considered eligible to work which = the available eligible Labor Force.
(2) How many of this eligible labor force stated in #(1) do they currently consider as “participating” via either being employed, via collecting unemployment insurance, or as “actively searching for work” via their available methods of measure (Unemployment Office numbers, Manpower numbers, and other reporting.)
And
(3) How many of #(1) currently elibible to be considered in the Labor Force are Not-Participating.
That’s it peroid. Yes, it leaves large numbers of individuals uncounted, which is why the BLS numbers are disingenuous to say the least. and why it is little more than political-beaurocratic statistics. As much as you may want to include the retired and relative lifespans, that does not come into bearing in the criteria the BLS uses to caculate it’s report. Nor does the number of people working illegally under the table count, nor does it include any of the undocumented (such as illegal immigants working or not, nor the homeless the number of which can not be realistically documented,) The BLS numbers do not differentiate how many are working multiple jobs, they are simply counted as being employed. The BLS does not in it’s Labor Force numbers differentiate or compare how many have joined the workforce by coming of legal age to work versus how many are retired, nor does it differentiate those retired considered to be via of retired age, but whom are still working.
The BLS report also does not consider the prevaling wages or whether the jobs filled are full time or part time, they are only considered as the number of individuals “participating”.
The BLS formula is intended to reveal the what of things, not the why. They’re simply attempting to estimate the size of the work force and what percentage of the population is not currently part of it.
Other factors enter in when you’re trying to explain why that result is trending one way or the other. The rate at which people are retiring from work would be one such.
@Ditto:
Let’s see, an increase in the working age population under Obama. Check.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=A2j
An employment to population ratio that is still lower than what it was B.O. (before Obama). Check.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
9,698,000 Americans who either are (1) working part time but wanted full time work, (2) are marginally attached to the labor force, or (3) who gave up looking for work. Check.
Per the recent BLS report:
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to
as involuntary part-time workers), at 6.9 million, changed little in November. These
individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time
because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time
job. (See table A-8.)
In November, 2.1 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force,
essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.)
These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work,
and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as
unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the
survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 698,000 discouraged workers in November,
little different from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.)
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe
no jobs are available for them.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
@Greg:
Thank you for giving another prime example of how Democrats cannot look to the future when they pass their Socialist agendas. Or are you going to tell me that when FDR, and a Democrat Congress, shoved through what many, including myself, considers to be an unconstitutional act, the Social Security Act, they were not smart enough to know that the average life expectancy for a white woman in 1935 was 62, for a white male, 60 and mid 50’s for a black male when then set the age of retirement at 65? Hell yes, they knew and they counted on people not living long enough to collect Social Security. It was just another way to redistribute wealth.
Every now and then you really step in it, Greggie.
@Greg:
No Greg, you still don’t understand, which makes it clear to me that you don’t want to. The BLS Labor Participation rate doesn’t include the entire population. It only includes those eligible to participate. PERIOD. The “retired” by the word’s very definition excludes them from being counted amongst the available labor force.
As far as the BLS Labor Participation Rate is concerned these “other factors” of yours are not relavant. Ergo they are not counted. The Labor Participation Rate is not concerned about how many have retired, because they are no longer part of the BLS’s current eligible labor force caculations. Why aren’t they? because “retired” means that the person is not in the labor force. IF the BLS included the retired in their formulas, the non-participation rate would be much,much worse than is shown in the incomplete and disingenuous report they provide. You are wrong, the BLS formula cares nothing about your “other factors” simply accept it and get over it.