As usual, the number of missing jobs is calculated assuming that as many people now would want jobs as did in January 2000, when good jobs were plentiful, if government policies were not reducing employment. The population of 16 and older non-institutionalized people grew by 212,000 people in August. It is expected that 67.49% of these new potential workers would want jobs if good jobs were available. This means to keep up with the population growth, 143,079 new jobs needed to be added in August compared to July. Instead, 568,000 fewer people were employed in August. This is a disaster, yet the normal unemployment rate went down! As I have pointed out over the last two and a half years, this number is virtually meaningless when the jobs situation has long been awful. What we should do to look for any possible progress in creating jobs is compare the same month employment and better yet missing jobs numbers for the same month a year ago and two years ago, since these numbers are not seasonally adjusted. Much like the unemployment percentage, long recessions/depressions cause the seasonal adjustments to become dubious. The missing jobs numbers are plotted below.
We find that in August 2012, there are 270,000 more missing jobs now than there were one year ago in August 2011. Comparing to August 2010, the missing jobs number has increased even more to 1,050,000 more missing jobs. According to Obama and Biden this is turning the corner on job creation. Strangely, they portray this as a good thing justifying their being re-elected. I suspect they live in an alternative universe in which everything bad is thought to be good. That would explain why they are such committed socialists.
So, the Obama/Democrat jobs policies increased the actual number of missing jobs by more than 1 million over the last two years of what they call jobs recovery. The real unemployment rate is 13.3%, rather than the misleading 8.1% they are claiming. They love to claim that they have created jobs every month for many months, but do not point out that with a growing population, jobs have to be created simply to tread water. As we see in comparing the new August data with the prior two year August data sets, they are not treading water, but drowning.
In August 2011, white people had an unemployment rate of 7.9%, which has now dropped to 7.2%. But, this is because the labor force participation rate for whites fell from 64.8% to 64.0%, not because relatively more whites are employed. The Hispanic labor force participation rate is higher than that for whites and fell by less from August 2011 to August 2012, from 66.7% to 66.1%. Their unemployment rate fell from 11.1% to 10.1%, again substantially because the participation rate fell. Black unemployment fell in the year from 17.0% to 14.5% and their low participation rate fell the least from 62.0% to 61.7%. Blacks are the only group that is better off now than they were in August 2011, though their unemployment rates are still much the higher compared to those of Hispanics and whites.
The following employment to population ratio chart is another way to see the essential stagnation of the jobs recovery over the last couple of years despite the claims by this most deception administration of a jobs recovery. This shows that this ratio has been flat at a very low rate since at least October of 2009. The otherworldly claims of a job recovery by the Obama administration are completely and utterly false and maliciously misleading. We see that the dot.com recession led to a decrease in the jobs to population ratio which continued until mid-2003, followed by a slow and partial recovery that ended at the start of 2007. The government fueled and even required sub-prime mortgage collapse was finally arrested about October 2009, but there has been jobs stagnation since. We are now very close to a three-year period of jobs stagnation under Obama on the heels of a deep recession.
This is hardly surprising given Obama's determined efforts to make business less profitable and more risky, not to mention his efforts to make businessmen look dishonorable. Well, businessmen decided they would not take this nonsense and they have been on a serious slowdown strike since. Atlas has at least removed the weighty world from his shoulders and ceased to carry it up the hill of progress. Atlas has Shrugged, even if he was too responsible to simply drop the world. For now, he is biding his time in hopes that Obama will be given his walking papers in the November election. If Obama is removed, Atlas will put the world back on his shoulder and move our economy forward again, as the American Atlas has for decades and even centuries. If Obama is re-elected, stagnation will continue and our economy will soon be unable to support the growing weight of Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaUncaringTax, Social Security, and the payment of interest on the debt. Big government will be doomed to collapse.
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