Still No Jobs Recovery in the Great Socialist Recession

The January 2014 jobs report is out from the BLS.  Ignoring the unemployment rate, which is meaningless given the many people who have given up on finding a job in this never-ending Great Socialist Recession, the number to focus on is the employment to population ratio.  Let us examine the history of the employment to population ratio for Januaries going back to January 2007, before the sharp increase in energy prices and the subsequent financial failures.

Note that the lowest employment to population percentage was 57.6% in January 2011, prior to which our government was telling us that the employment situation was well into recovery from the recession which they had declared over much earlier than that in June 2009.  Now, in January 2014, the employment percentage is a miserly 58.1% according to the BLS.  In fact, it is really 58.0% on the same basis that the earlier employment numbers are given.  In March 2013, the BLS recategorized some workers who work in the home from the farm sector to the non-farm sector.  That re-categorization caused an artificial increase in the employment to population ratio, giving the government a desperately needed apparent increase in jobs.

So let us examine how far the jobs recovery has occurred in this never-ending recession.  The present 58.0% is an employment to population ratio which is only 0.4% higher than that of the worst January of the entire recession.  Since the drop in the employment ratio from January 2007 prior to the recession to January 2011 at the depth of the jobs recession was 5.0%, the extent of a jobs recovery is

0.4% / 5.0% = 0.08.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.  In the 4.5 years since the government says the recession ended, the jobs recovery has managed only to recover 0.08 of the lost employment to population ratio.  This is pathetic.  It is a terrible misrepresentation to say we are in a jobs recovery.  We are in a deep jobs depression and for all intents and purposes the jobs situation has been stuck in a deep pit.  Perhaps a pit with a slightly sloping bottom, but so what!  Those who claim an 8% jobs recovery over four and a half years is a recovery should be scorned.  They should be laughed out of town.

The Progressive Elitists surrounding Obama and backing his anti-business policies look down upon most Americans as people who are unable to choose their own values and manage their own lives without strong controls placed on them by these same Progressive Elitists.  They are sure they know better than most of us Americans how to manage the economy and all aspects of our need to earn a living.  They hold us in scorn and look down on us in the worst possible way.  Some of them even think the recession and such problems as high energy prices are a good thing, because of their exaggerated belief that mankind's standard of living comes at the expense of the environment.

Most of us are prepared to have the results of our work judged by those we work with, work for, sell to, and compete with.  Let us hold them to a standard that measures them by the results they achieve.  If they tout their success with a 8% jobs recovery and expect us to ignore the 92% of the recovery denied to us and the private sector due to their interference, we should turn the scorn table on them.  We must evaluate them as catastrophic failures in governance.  We must see that big government cannot produce jobs as they claimed it could.  We must see the government must get out of the way or it will keep us from creating the jobs we have proven over and over that we can create for ourselves.

The Progressive Elitists and Obama keep saying "We did not build that."  Well, we used to and we will again, if only we will get them out of our way.  Throw the Bums Out!

Explanation for the Huge Surge in Part-Time Jobs in September

It has been pointed out that in years past, employment of 18 to 25 year olds has fallen drastically in September as students returned to college and gave up their summer jobs.  Not this September.  Also not last September.

I suspect three things are going on here.  One is that these last two summers, many fewer students were able to find jobs in the summer, so the student drop in employment in September was much less due to them returning to college.  Another effect is that with college expenses having increased much more than family incomes have for many years and the actual loss of real family incomes over the last few years, many more students may have very part-time work-aid assignments at their colleges as part of their student-aid package.  Finally, in the past, the BLS was inclined to ignore these very part-time college jobs and not count these students as employed while in college.  What if they are now very assiduously counting these work aid students as part-time employed in the household survey?  This would account for the strange increase in employment of 18 - 25 year olds these last two Septembers and for the huge increase in part-time jobs precisely in the month of September.

This is a very natural way for the Obama administration to make use of the students to help save his re-election chances.  The Democrats have been very assiduous in courting students by forcing their parent's health insurance to allow them to be kept on their parent's policies until they are 26, by ever more heavily subsidizing their student loans, and by carefully indoctrinating them in the beliefs of the Progressive Elitists in dominant control of virtually every college campus.  These students are in turn generally very enthusiastic supporters.  The Democrats are child molesters, though in this case molesters of their underdeveloped minds.  They give a great deal of thought of how to take advantage of them, so it is a natural thing that they thought of using their work-aid as a means to bolster the employment numbers just prior to the election.

Update, Afternoon of 10 October 2012:

That was an interesting idea, but on looking deeper into the BLS numbers in Table A-8 and Table A-9 in the September employment report, it does not hold water.  Instead, we find something very different and still disturbing.  First let us look at the change in employed by age from Table A-9 in September compared to August using the Not Seasonally Adjusted Numbers:

16-17 years, -130,000
18-19 years, -455,000
20-24 years, +101,000
25-34 years, +291,000
35-44 years, +249,000
45-54 years, +238,000
55 & older, +483,000

College students are mostly 18 - 21, so it is fairly clear that there is a net decrease in employment in those ages, so the work-study part-time work is not the explanation.  The explanation is found in Table A-8, where we find that the major change in employment was in government workers.  Government workers increased by 934,000!!!!!  The more complete story in the Not Seasonally Adjusted numbers is:

Government workers, +934,000
Self-employed workers, unincorporated, +90,000
Agriculture and related industries, -53,000
Private households, +15,000
Other Industries, -221,000

So much as one would expect given the general sorry state of the economy, industry is shedding employees in large numbers and some of the unemployed are setting up their own micro-businesses.  What on Earth is going on with this massive hiring of government workers though?

Teachers are mostly government workers and they do massively become employed again in September after being off for the summer.  However, any seasonal adjustment should eliminate the annual effect of re-hiring teachers in September.  So, we can examine the seasonally adjusted number of government employees and should see this number wiped out to the degree that it is teachers.  It turns out that the seasonally adjusted number is only 106,000 lower!  Now this makes no sense, since there are clearly many times 106,000 teachers who go back to public school jobs in September.  Maybe if the adjustment was formulated over many years, the fact that more teachers may have found summer jobs in the past than could now might make for a smaller adjustment projected from the past onto the present.

The federal government has not been hiring massive numbers of new employees and the state and local governments are having trouble paying the employees they already have.  It would appear that there was no adequate seasonal adjustment for the annual return of government-employed teachers to public schools!  Whatever the case of the surge in the numbers of government workers, this is not an indication of any sort of recovery in the economy.  On the contrary, the numbers indicate a worsening of the economy with the loss of 221,000 more jobs in industry.  A gain of 934,000 government workers, even if actual, would not be indicative of an improving economy.

How could the BLS fail to make a seasonal adjustment on teachers that would not make their annual return to school look like a boom in hiring?  How convenient for Obama that in the last employment report prior to the election they did not make this annual correction?  All of those claims that the BLS is staffed with professional and incorruptible people are hard to support now.