The Ever-Vanishing Jobs Recovery

Once more the wisp of a hint of a jobs recovery from the never-ending Great Socialist Recession has vanished as mist before our eyes in the early hours of the morning.  Obama and the socialist Senate have once again succeeded with their anti-business rhetoric, past law-creation, and present regulatory harassment to push investors into inactivity.  Rationally these investors will not invest and create jobs in the private sector to a degree that will allow Americans to once again proudly earn a living because they cannot reasonably see profits under the present regime in Washington.

Let us examine the consequences of the March employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  They are summarized in the following table, which uses the non-seasonally adjusted numbers:

Now the unemployment rate is not very meaningful in a recession in stasis, as I point out almost every month, due to many who would like to work giving up in despair or going back to school or into training in hopes of later having a chance for a job.  Some do continue to search for a job, but have simply given up on those methods which make them visible to the BLS.  It is more meaningful to examine the number for the percentage of the employed as a part of the total non-institutional civilian working age population. 

In March 2012, the employed were 58.29% of the working age population.  This compares to 58.14% in March 2011.  So in the last year of so-called recovery we advanced the percentage of employed by 0.15%!  There is not much to show for the last year there.  How does the March 2012 case compare with March 2010?  In March 2010, the percentage of workers to the working age population was 58.18%, so in two years of "recovery" the percentage of the employed increased by ....... 0.11%!!!!  Is this recovery underwhelming, or what?  It would appear that John Galt is on strike.  We have returned to the stasis of the caveman's era.

Assuming that as large a fraction of the population would like to be working today as did in January 2000 when good jobs were plentiful, we can calculate the number of missing jobs.  The updated plot of the number of missing jobs is given below:

There is nothing exceptional about March and its comparison with the two previous Marches.  The same is true for Februaries or for Januaries or any other month over the last two years.  There has been no improvement in the jobs situation at all.  All the talk about new jobs being created has fallaciously attempted to misdirect the listener from the fact that the jobs created have only been enough to keep pace with population growth, but not enough to rehire the millions of Americans who lost jobs in the deepest part of the recession.  The media has largely been a propaganda tool.  We still have 22.321 million jobs missing in our economy!  Without a major change in the November 2012 election, this situation will continue.  We will have settled into the chronic unemployment rates of many of the socialist European countries into which Obama set out to transform the USA.