No Decrease in Missing Jobs Over the Last Two Years

After nearly four years of a recessionary period, the normally reported unemployment rate means very little due to people giving up on finding a job.  Of course someone unemployed might become self-employed, but with the many hassles our governments, local, state, and federal have chosen to create for businessmen, not everyone has the stamina, or is it the foolhardiness, to become an employer.  Let us check up on the real unemployment situation through October 2011.

Once again, I will calculate the real number of missing jobs in our economy compared to January 2000 when jobs were plentiful and pay and benefits were sufficient to entice many Americans to choose to work.  The unemployment rate was then 4.04% and there was a shortage of only 5,689,000 jobs, though much of that was really normal turnover as people chose to change jobs or career paths.  The number of missing jobs can be calculated by assuming that 67.49% of Americans would want jobs now if they were available and offered good compensation as they did in January 2000.  Due to the bursting of the dot com bubble in the early part of the first decade, by December 2005 the real number of missing jobs had climbed to 6.98% and that rate of missing jobs was almost identically the same when the current recession started.  As we shall see, the number of missing jobs soared higher in this recession and the jobs recession has never ended.  We are now missing 21,171,000 jobs, which is almost identical to the number of missing jobs in October 2010 and more than the missing job number of November 2009.  There has been no progress in decreasing the number of missing jobs in the last year or the last two years.

The real unemployment rate is that given in the last row of the table.  In July it was 13.21%, in August it was 13.31%, and in September it was 13.28%.  In other words, there was no significant change and no improvement in the jobless rate in those three consecutive months.  There appears to be a small improvement in October, though the statistical significance of any one month is usually low.  The rate for October 2011 was slightly improved to 13.06%.  There are no fewer missing jobs than in October 2010, however.  At the October rate of improvement, this jobs recession will never end.  This is hardly surprising given that the Obama administration remains as determined as ever to pursue policies contrary to the needs of employers and the economic freedoms they require and have every individual right to require.

Let us examine a chart of the number of missing jobs for the last 11 years:

There are more missing jobs at the start of November 2011 than there were in November 2009.  Two more years of Obama and we have only fallen backward on the jobs situation.  The man who wants to harm whole American industries such as the coal, oil, and natural gas industries and all those industries dependent upon these industries, knows everything there is to know about how to keep America from recovering from a severe recession.  The man who gave us ObamaCare against the People's wishes and against the interests of employers and the man who penalized good financial institutions and most borrowers with Dodd-Frank financial "reform", knows how to squelch investment and employment like no one else.  Repeated stimulus efforts, quantitative easings of bad loans or the federal debt, subsidies of weak industries such as the green energy industries, and bailouts of overspent state and local governments have had the certain effect of weakening the private sector at the expense of a parasitic cabal of governments and crony mercantilists.

Americans want to work and to create jobs, but at every turn, government policies are mounting to discourage the creation of jobs.  These sorry government policies have proven very effective in creating this jobs stasis.  A massive decrease in government regulations, mandates, subsidies, corporate and investment taxes, and spending is the only way out of this mess.  Obama and the Democrat Socialists have a big government and anti-private sector agenda which will not allow any jobs creation to occur.  The result is exactly what a rational observer would expect: A never-ending jobs recession.