Unemployment, the Lie by Misdirection

With the publication of the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers for December 2011, we have generally been told that there is good news for employment.  We have been told that unemployment is down to 8.5% based on seasonally adjusted numbers.  This is a very big lie by misdirection, though it may be fully consistent with the usual practice by which unemployment is defined.  As I have said many times, during a long recession or depression, the usual practice produces a meaningless number.  Let us search for some real meaning in the job statistics of the BLS.

Because of the tendency for people to give up on searching for jobs when they have been long unemployed and unable to find employment, the number of people listed as unemployed and in the job market tends to drop or at least not to keep up with the growth of the population.  As a result, the usual unemployment number becomes meaningless.  One has to start looking at the actual numbers of people employed and the percent of the working age population that has a job.  This is where the real story is.  To do this, we must look at the numbers given in the following table:

Note that this table does not use the seasonally adjusted numbers which I suspect may not be realistically adjusted using normal seasonal swings when one is in a long-term recession.  In this table, we can follow the actual numbers of civilian work age people, the actual employed, the percentage of people employed, and we can calculate the number of people who would want jobs if good jobs were as plentiful as they were in January 2000 and for several years prior to that.  Note that in December 2005, 142.779 million Americans were employed, but in December 2011, only 140.681 million Americans were employed.  The number of employed Americans in that 6 years dropped by 2.098 million even as the working age population grew by 13.159 million.  The Obama economy of December 2011 is indeed in a very sorry state.  But this does not keep Obama from crowing at the top of his lung power that the economy is healing due to his policies.

The number of people unemployed is only 12.692 million now and it was 15.137 million in July 2010.  That looks like good news!  Ahhh......, but how disappointing it is to see that there were only 0.547 million fewer people employed in July 2010 than in December 2011.  In that year and a half of "recovery" from the recession, the working age population grew by 2.694 million while the number employed grew by only 0.547 million.  The percent of the working age people employed fell from 58.91% to 58.47%.

What happened to the number of missing jobs?  Not much.  In fact the number increased from the November 2011 report.  To be sure, month to month variations are not very meaningful, so we should look at longer trends.  Note that in seasonally adjusted numbers, the Obama administration is claiming that the number of jobs increased by 200,000!  The actual numbers of employed show no such increase.  In December 2011 the number of missing jobs was 21.689 million.  This is 378,000 fewer missing jobs than in December 2010.  At this rate of recovery, we can have as few missing jobs as in December 2007 in 28.2 years.  Yes, that is years, not months!  Obama should crow really loud about that.  With this Obama rate of recovery from the recession we can achieve the January 2000 number of missing jobs in 42.3 years!

Since May of 2011, the number of missing jobs is almost flat.  There is no sign of improvement.  Indeed, there is very little change over the last two years of supposed recovery.  This is totally unlike any recovery from a recession since WWII.

The wonder is that we have an economy which is stagnated in job growth.  Given the impending ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank regulatory controls onslaughts, the totally union-boss controlled NLRB thanks to unconstitutional despot appointments, the soaring costs of gasoline with central planning help, the soaring cost of electricity, the government refusal to allow oil and gas drilling, the upcoming cost increases for vehicles forced to go 54.5 mpg, the increased costs for food and drugs thanks to heavy-handed Obama regulations and added taxes, the money extracted from the private sector to be wasted on green energy developments, the increased state taxes in many states, the failure of the federal government to reduce our highest in the developed world corporate income tax and very high capital gains tax, and a never-ending threat by the President and Senate leadership to punitively tax the most productive members of society, it is a wonder that the private sector is keeping pace with the population growth at all in its job creation rate.  One can only imagine what the private sector could do if the governments, federal, state, and local, were to get off the backs of businessmen.