The Obama Jobs "Recovery"

Let us update the extent of the Obama jobs "recovery."  The most important datum informing us of the health of the economy to provide Americans a means to earn a living is the employment to population ratio.  When many people work, the economy is more likely to hum along fine and operate to raise our standard of living.  When fewer people work, there are more demands for high government extractions of wealth from the productive private sector, the standard of living stagnates or worse, and the people become more dependent upon the Big Government parasite.  So here is the non-seasonally adjusted data on the employment to population percentage according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The fraction of the American non-institutionalized population over 16 which is employed has risen somewhat through April 2014 from a downward drop in the latter half of 2013.  However, this all-critical employment to population ratio is still well below the already very low ratio when he first took the oath of office of the presidency in January 2009.  More critically for Americans, the usual pattern of a recovery from recession within a couple of years to return to a similar employment to population ratio as that prior to the recession is in no way evident.  It is far more accurate to call this employment stagnation in the depths of a never-ending depression than to call this a recovery.

Yet many are shouting harrahs because the so-called unemployment rate dropped in April, even as 800,000 people left the workforce.  Many Americans are in the depth of despair at finding a decent job.  The reports are that most of the jobs that were created in April were relatively low-paying and unskilled jobs.  This is hardly surprising to me given the assertively anti-private sector policies of the Obama Oligarchy Gang of his dictatorial, individual rights trampling, Constitution ignoring, anti-energy, anti-business, micromanaging, lawless, and self-ownership denying regime.  In such a chaotic environment, the private sector does not invest in new business ventures and does not hire.  Obama's claims that money spent by government, which it removes from the private sector, is an investment has been tested many times throughout history.  That experiment always fails to back the statist theory and has failed once again under the Obama Regime.

This remains the never-ending Great Socialist Recession.  Although, given its duration and the degree of human misery it has caused, it is becoming more and more nearly correct to upgrade this condition to the Great Socialist Depression of the 21st Century.  The low employment, the huge transfer of wealth from the private to the government sector, the lawlessness of the government, and the rate of implementation of new socialist programs is very akin to the Great Depression of the 20th Century.  This is what you get when you put government in the hands of the Progressive Elitists.  For all their pretense to know better than most Americans how their lives should by micro-managed by this Progressive Elitist clique, they always manage to mess our society up royally.

We Americans do much better when we insist on controlling our own lives and living them in accordance with our self-chosen values.  Our standard of living is highly dependent upon our rejection of the Progressive Elitist claim that we did not make that.  It is each of us as an individual who must make our own lives and must honor and protect the right of every other individual to do the same.  We must fight off the usurpation of power over our lives by a power-lusting Progressive Elitist cabal.  That cabal refuses to recognize our highly individualistic natures, rich in complexity and highly differentiated.  It refuses to recognize our self-ownership as ObamaCare especially makes clear.  It refuses to recognize our ability to use reason to improve our own lives while exercising our individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of our own happiness.  As the Declaration of Independence asserts the protection of such broad individual rights as the sole legitimate justification for a highly limited government and thereby defines the American Principle, the Progressive Elitist movement is profoundly anti-American.

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!

Obama's Job Destruction Plan Illustrated

We have long been seeing updates of the graph that Obama and his henchmen used to illustrate the effect of their jobs creation plan with comparison to the jobs recovery with no such plan.  The effect of his distributing huge sums of printed and borrowed money among his campaign contributors and such of his constituents as he expected had purchasable votes is clearly shown in this most recent update of that graph.  The actual unemployment (actually understated) through the recession is shown with the red dots and this far exceeds the anticipated unemployment rate if Obama did nothing.

Surely we should assume that the difference between the original projected unemployment rate and the actual unemployment rate is the result of Obama's policies.  In other words, instead of improving the jobs situation, those policies clearly worsened it during this Great Socialist Recession.  They worsened it far worse than this plot implies too, since the actual unemployment rate is really much higher than the stated rate as I have many times pointed out.  This is due to the many people who have given up hope of finding employment and stopped looking for it.  It is also due to the many people who have become comfortable on food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, and on Social Security disability payments under Obama's inducements to do so.

Obama's New Normal Part-Time Economy

Average hours worked for all non-farm private employees has been stuck at 34.4 hours for 4 months now.  The average hours for non-farm private production and non-supervisory employees dropped 0.1 hours in October to 33.6 hours.

Real per capita GDP is $50,166 through the third quarter, but it would be $55,932 if long-term historical trends had not been replaced by the Obama "new normal."  This loss of $5,766 per person is sorely felt.  High unemployment and all-too-common part-time employment has kept the economy from expanding at historic rates.

As Mike Shedlock has noted, the recovery of hours worked following the period of nominal GDP contraction shown in the light blue region of the plot below has stalled out.  The earlier rate of increase was substandard following a recession.  For many months now, Obama's "new normal" has settled in.  The question is, are Americans ready to settle for the Obama "new normal."

There is no reason at all to do so.  The U.S. economy is more than ready to recover, if only Washington will stop doing everything it can to prevent business success.  One of the big factors is the pressure that ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, is putting on businesses to convert full-time positions into part-time positions.  ObamaCare defines full-time employment for the purposes of requiring health insurance coverage or the payment of a penalty by the business as a mere 30 hours of work a week.  As a result, many businesses are putting a limit of 25 to 28 hours a week on their employees.  The tax assessment on employees requires a look-back period of 3 months to a year, to be selected as an option by the employer.  Consequently, companies have had to ensure that at the latest, many of their employees had less than 30-hour workweeks for more than the last 3 months of this year.  The Obama "new normal" is a 25-hour workweek for many Americans.

Scott Rasmussen on the GOP

There is a very important difference between the GOP and the Democrat Socialist Party which Scott Rasmussen understands.  He notes that this difference is obscured by the politicians:

Establishment Republicans in Washington broadly share the Democrats' view that the government should manage the economy. They may favor a somewhat more pro-business set of policies than their Democratic colleagues, but they still act as if government policy is the starting point for all economic activity.

He observed that Democrat Party members are comfortable with the idea that Washington is the "starting point for all economic activity."  However, the membership of the Republican Party thinks very differently and therefore believes that its Washington leadership is wrongheaded with its comfort in control of the economy by Washington.  He says:

The GOP base sees government as a burden that weighs the private sector down rather than a tool that can generate growth if used properly. Ninety-six percent of Republican voters believe that the best thing the government can do to help the economy is to cut spending and free up more money for the private sector.

To the degree that Romney's plan for economic recovery involves the government getting off the back of businessmen, with lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more opportunities to develop our resources, the Democrats and the media mostly complain that this is no plan at all.  For them, all economic planning must involve a government action managed intimately by a horde of central planners.

But, 96% of Republicans understand that business and economic activity are very capable of taking care of themselves in the private sector, if only the government will get off of their backs and allow them to earn a living and hire Americans.  Unfortunately for the Republic and for Republicans, Romney seems to understand this, but is largely unwilling to state it clearly for fear of leaving the comfort zone with the Republican Establishment, Washington politicians, and the media.  If Romney loses this election or just squeaks in as the next President, it will be because he failed to state emphatically enough what most Republican Party members understand.  Government is the Problem.

Government Centrally Planned Economy Continues to Kill Job Recovery

The July 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report of the Household Survey without any seasonal correction of data, revealed a loss of 76,000 jobs in July compared to June.  This was rarely reported in the mainstream media.  The nominal, though rather meaningless, unemployment rate went up from 8.43% to 8.56%.  The percentage of the population with jobs dropped to 58.81% from 58.89% in June.  The headline statistic reported by the mainstream media was that 163,000 jobs were added in July.  This was based on seasonally adjusted data from the Establishment report, but there are problems with the seasonal adjustments in this unprecedented recession and there are a record number of self-employed people these days since they cannot find jobs otherwise.  Many of those self-employed people decided in July that they were not really effectively employed any longer.  They had tried self-employment in desperation and failed in the uphill struggle with the Obama economy.  To take the fate of these people into account, we need to examine the Household Survey data, as I have been doing all along in this unprecedented and never-ending recession.

The number of missing jobs is calculated based on the employment workforce of January 2000 when many quality jobs were available and the unemployment rate was 4.04%.  The workforce then was 67.49% of the total non-institutional civilian working age population.  The number of missing jobs in July 2012 is slightly lower than it was in July 2011 by 256,000 jobs, but it is higher by 696,000 jobs than it was in the miserable month of July 2010!  In two years of supposed recovery the number of missing jobs has actually increased by almost 700,000.  This is not a real recovery.  It is all smoke and mirrors.  The percentage of missing jobs compared to those wanted went up from 12.74% in June to 12.86% in July.

Biomedical and diagnostics companies such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Covidien, Abbot Labs, Qiagen, Invacare, GE, SurModics, WorldHeart Corp., the Cordis Div. of Johnson & Johnson, C. R. Bard, BioMerieux, Celera, Cardo Medical, Resetta Genomics, and Care Fusion are all laying off employees, many citing the 2.3% tax on all revenues, not profits, from biomedical devices and on clinical testing in ObamaCare, or more accurately, ObamaUncaringTax.

Defense companies are doing the same in anticipation of the large cut-backs in defense spending brought on by the sequestering of defense funds as the Democrat Senate has failed to produce a budget in the entire presidency of Obama, or over 1203 days or 3.3 years.  This budget is required by law for very good reasons, but this Senate is lawless.  A recent study by George Mason University scholars calculates that the sequester cut-backs in military equipment purchases and R&D will result in the loss of about 1 million jobs.  Because the reduction in funds begins on 2 January 2013 and the WARN Act requires companies making large layoffs to give employees 60 days notice, these reductions will substantially have to occur by 3 November 2012.  Identifying the victims and processing such large numbers of lay-offs takes a massive amount of management time and hurts productivity.  The best way to handle such a process is to begin paring employees early, which many of these companies have been and continue to do.  Most of these cuts have nonetheless not yet been announced or made.

The Obama and EPA war on fossil fuels also is killing jobs.  Coal mines are closing and coal-fired electric power plants are closing.  Some railroad jobs will be lost as a result.  Because electricity costs are going up substantially as a result of losing low-cost coal-fired power plants and the mandates for very expensive wind and solar power, many businesses have higher costs and cannot hire added employees or are losing those they had.  The Obama restrictions on offshore and federal lands drilling and exploration for oil have caused many potential jobs to be lost in those activities.  America has an incredible portion of the world supply of coal, oil, and natural gas.  Feeder and long-distance oil pipelines have also not been built, which would have provided many jobs.  Refinery expansions and new refineries are badly needed, but regulations make such investments very hard to make.  This is another lost opportunity and results in higher fuel costs for transportation and higher plastic costs as well.  These higher costs inhibit the growth of many companies and add to reductions in consumer disposable income.  This senseless Obama vendetta has cost Americans many, many jobs.

Good government does not steal so much money and other resources from the productive private sector.  Good government is minimal government and serves only to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and the pursuit of happiness.  Such legitimate government makes way so that a robust private sector can produce a cornucopia of jobs, products, services, and ideas.  The illegitimate Obama government is greatly inhibiting the private sector and preventing the private sector from generating this abundance of wealth.  The role of government in producing jobs is simply to get out of the way.  That is a fact the Democrat Socialists will never understand.  If you want jobs and a healthy economy, this Obama administration and this Democrat Senate must be dismantled as a result of the November election.

Ignorant of Business, Uninterested in American Jobs

Obama has proven himself uninterested in American business and totally ill-informed about how jobs are created.  He believes that if only government spends enough money on government programs, on subsidies for a few industries chosen for their support of socialist programs in exchange for those subsidies, and vilifies businessmen before the People for not creating jobs in America, that he can create jobs.  Unfortunately, he has only created government jobs, which always create a drain on the private sector, forcing it to increase production just to compensate for that drain.  When all of their hard-earned production increase is taken by government in the form of added taxes, added time for government reports, and added efforts to abide by massive and contradictory regulations and laws, the employers of the private sector no longer have the resources to create jobs.  What is more, they have less desire to create jobs, which only adds to their personal sense of responsibility in an ever more uncertain hell managed by ever-growing, arbitrary government.

Obama hates business, except as a victim from which he can suck wealth.  He is very comfortable in his disregard for the effort it takes to run a private business.  He is careful to keep people with knowledge of business at several arms-length remove.  Presidents are listed below with the percentage of Cabinet-level positions for each headed by someone with significant business experience:

Even John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter had use for the management skills and knowledge of businessmen at rates several times that of Obama.  Obama's own cluelessness is continuously ensured by his creation of a cocoon with nary the slightest influence of real-world businessmen.  There is no danger that this inept President will ever figure out what is needed to help the American economy recover and regain the self-assurance for which it is usually well-known.  Without that self-assurance, that comes to the American businessman when he knows he resides in an intelligible world in which he can calculate probable business growth and profits, no significant numbers of private sector jobs will be created.  That is a huge human tragedy, for as I showed here, the number of missing jobs in the American economy is 20.4 million!!!!!  That is a great many degraded American lives.

I wish to thank iamnothere for directing my attention to these figures on Presidential business cabinet member experience.