State of the Jobs Recovery -- What Recovery?

Any time a new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report comes out with a positive number of people hired, Democrat Socialists cheer and proclaim Obama a wise and great socialist leader.  Let us put some perspective on the current state of employment in the USA:

The percentage of the population 16 and over employed according to the BLS is:

Yes, the average slope from the bottom of the recession unemployment well is positive.  But the extent of the recovery is still, after 8 years, very small.  Years ago, without very detrimental federal government policies, we would have recovered to the point of returning to employment rates close to those established in the 2004 through 2006 period.  The employment rate is now more than 4% lower than in late 2006 and more than 3% lower than early 2004.  But the never-to-be-detered Progressive Elitist only sees the data from the bottom of the dip in October 2013 to the small peak in November 2014 and attributes that increase in employment to their man Obama.

A sane man asks, "What change of Obama's policies do they imagine might have caused about a 1% improvement over that one year period?"  I do not see that he has accomplished anything that would help the economy, except having lost Democrat control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election and then for most of this year looking as though he was going to lose control of the Senate in the 2014 election as well.  The looming loss and then the loss itself of the Democrat Socialist Senate surely did something positive to fuel the increasing optimism of the many small businessmen polled by the NFIB.

Let us look at the BLS data on the Labor Participation Rate for those 16 and older:

It sure is hard to find any good news here.  The labor participation rate is doing nothing but going downhill.

Let us look at the full-time employment rate and the under-employed rates for Americans 18 and over according to Gallup:

Payroll to population percentage counts those who are employed at least 30 hours a week.  Gallup uses the entire population, not just that part of a certain working age range population to calculate the percentage.  The 30 hour or more percentage has remained remarkably flat from the depths of the employment recession in 2010.  The percentage of people underemployed includes those who are part-time or unemployed.  These are all people who want to and can work more.  These underemployed people have been decreasing somewhat, but since the percentage with full-time employment has not increased, this means that more and more of them have simply dropped out of the labor force, consistent with the Labor Force Participation graph of the BLS shown above.  Their numbers are decreasing only because they are losing their desire to work.

People lose their desire to work when they see no hope for a decent job.  They lose their desire to work when they see that being on welfare provides them with more benefits than working does.  This removal of Americans from the working force is the one and only accomplishment of Obama.  It works for him and the many Progressive Elitists who want more and more people dependent upon the mercies of Big Government for their survival and therefore eager to vote for more socialism.