GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

The Obamacomony

by

The size of the U.S. deficit isn’t the only thing they lie about. Unemployment is another.

Last week, The New York Times trumpeted, Jobs Roar Back With Gain of 287,000 in June, Easing Worry, with the official unemployment rate at 4.9%. Isn’t it wonderful?

“Wow, this one takes my breath away,” said Diane Swonk, an independent economist in Chicago.

Ooh, she’s “independent” – that makes her reaction valid! But here’s the real story.

  • The same jobs report has downward-revised the previous months’ numbers (from bad to horrible).
  • In the Bush years, the media would treat a jobs number in the 200k range as a crisis.
  • The Obama so-called “recovery” is the Weakest. On. Record.
  • Most of the jobs created in the Obama years, including the recent jobs report, are part-time and low-paying.
  • In the Obama years, tens of millions of Americans have given up even hoping for a job. “Labor force participation” has plummeted to lows not seen since the 1970s.
  • If we use the participation rate from early 2009 when Obama took office, the unemployment rate is 11%. (And that’s ignoring under-employment / the part-time jobs.)
  • And no, the declining participation isn’t because “the Baby Boomers are retiring”. They’re not retiring. Under Obama, they can’t afford it. They’ve been coming out of retirement, to take those low-paying, part-time Obamajobs from young people.
  • Young people face a crisis; many can’t get an entry-level job.

Perhaps this is why President Obama has the highest U.S. suicide rate in 30 years.

Comments

  2. And no, the declining participation isn’t because “the Baby Boomers are retiring”. They’re not retiring. Under Obama, they can’t afford it.

    This is very frustrating to millennials. They want the jobs that the Baby Boomers can’t afford to retire from.

  4. Who knew jobs were interchangeable. Part-time coffee maker or full-time machinist; guy holding a Little Caesar’s Pizza sign board at the corner during rush hour and aircraft mechanic…

    I do have a question, though: The Kansas City economy doesn’t necessarily reflect the national economy but over the last couple of years, I see a lot of help-wanted signs. Last year, there was a fruit and vegetable company (supplies restaurants) looking for delivery drivers via billboards along the freeways; I’ve seen ads on TV looking for help.

    The nearby Home Depot has had help-wanted signs out for as long as I can remember. UPS has recruiting signs up; there are warehouse jobs in the part of town I work in. I’ve not seen them lately but Fed-Ex runs TV ads recruiting people to work in their distribution center.

    So, what’s up with that? None of these jobs pay a lot but they pay something and, for people that are on the ball, provide a path up the ladder. The full-time spots have to pay better than unemployment or disability.

    I’m an engineer and do OK but I’d work at Home Depot before sitting home all day; the boredom of sitting at home would be too much.

  5. A couple of years ago, I read that the way the GDP is calculated was changed. I wish I could find what I read, specifically what I read. It was changed to massage the numbers and make the economy look better. I think I recall reading that illegal products were being included. So meth labs are up, bidding the economy.

    But don’t quote on this — unless I can find the source.

  6. The really perverse part about the way GDP is calculated is that it includes Government spending. Which means the GDP can be juiced simply by the Government spending more, even though that Government can’t spend a dollar without taking more than a dollar from somewhere else.

  9. KCRob —

    What you’re talking about leads to something called wage scarring and it is apparently not something people recover from. Which freaks me out. Because I’m wage scarred.

    I took a crappy job, after eight months because I figured a crappy job was better than no job plus I foolishly and massively thought that once I got my foot in the door, there might be potential for advancement.

    Nope.

    I stagnated. I couldn’t move up, because they’d only hire “qualified” people for the position and since I took a job for which only a high school diploma was required, I was now labeled as a high school graduate. Forget that i had a master’s and more experience than the idiots that were hired for the positions I applied.

    I left there for a lateral move — another low paying job. I couldn’t find one at the level, or even close to the level, I had worked my way up to before I took the crappy job. And the other pathetic thing I Larsen’s is that your last job defines your next job. If you were the CFO of a mid sized company, but wound up taking a job as a low level clerk, you’d be lucky to maybe get a low level bookkeeping job after that. You may have to account for your last ten years on a resume, and add much as you may craft it as a functional or targeted resume, they’ll only care that you were a crappy clerk for the past three years.

  10. KCRob- don’t forget some people are getting paid more in unemployment than any of those jobs are offering. If unemployment pays you the equivalent of $13.50/hr for 40 hours, would you go to Home Depot for $11/hr? What are the chances you would ever get out of the system as much as you paid into unemployment via your paychecks?

    My view is that the elite don’t want a middle class & would rather rule over Mad Max Thunderdome, then have people like Martha Stewart come up from the lower classes to outperform them. Clinton’s son in law lost $325 million the week of Brexit despite having insider info most would kill for.

  11. Lee – that’s certainly something I’d not thought about. It looks like your last job title counts for more than experience.

    Business bureaucracies are competitive with gov’t bureaucracy in counterproductive procedures.