I’ve said it before: before long nobody will have a job and the mainstream media will be touting that unemployment is at zero percent.
It’s not just disappointing job numbers we’re looking at, of course; home prices, factory orders, retail sales and construction are all at godawful lows, too. Let’s talk about Sandra Fluke and her made-up claims so Democrats can demagogue a war on women; let’s talk about Mitt Romney’s dog forty years ago; look over here at the shiny toy I’m waving; just don’t look at Obama’s economic record.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is working overtime to somehow tease out something “positive” from disastrous economic figures. Mind you, they were working just as hard to find every dark cloud in every silver lining when Republican Ronald Reagan was president (as I’ve written about before):
When Ronald Reagan came into office he had an awful lot of terrible policies and terrible results from those policies to overcome. As I wrote back in October 2009:
The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.
And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”
When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.
Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.
I didn’t mention the labor participation rate in that article. Frankly I’m not even sure I was that aware of the damned labor participation rate at that point. But I’m sure aware of it now; and I am watching an employment holocaust under the most failed president in American history with growing horror.
Two years ago Tyler Durden pointed out that the labor participation rate was the lowest in 25 years:
Labor Force Participation Rate Drops To 25 Year Low, At 64.5%
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/05/2010 09:03 -0400The inverse silver lining to today’s jobs report that will be lost in the shuffle of what is perceived as a good NFP (despite consistent initial jobless claims of around 450K, which means that either there is a massive data error, or the rate of job creation has somehow surged) is that labor force participation has now dropped to the lowest rate it has been since 1984, at 64.5%. Assuming a reversion to the long-term average participation rate of 66%, means that the civilian labor force is in reality 157.4 million as opposed to the disclosed 153.9 million, a delta of 3.5 million currently unaccounted for. Maybe someone can ask the president during his imminent press conference what happened to the unemployed population, which would have been 18.3 if this labor force delta was incorporated, resulting in an unemployment rate of 11.6%.
Last year Tyler Durden pointed out that the labor participation rate was the lowest since 1984 (27 years):
Labor Force Participation Rate Drops To 63.9%, Lowest Since January 1984
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/05/2011 08:59 -0400While we still await for BLS.gov to finally come back up online half an hour after printing the actual NFP number, here is the one data point that we know for a fact: the labor force participation rate, and the reason why the general unemployment rate declined to 9.1%, just dropped to 63.9%, the lowest in 16 years, or matches the participation rate from January 1984.
Now, the Associated Press is pointing out that the labor participation rate – which was the worst in 25 years two years ago, and the worst in 27 years last year – IS THE WORST IN THIRTY-ONE YEARS!!!
US hiring slows sharply with just 115K jobs added
Published May 04, 2012
Associated PressU.S. employers pulled back on hiring in April for the second straight month, a sobering reminder that the economy remains weak. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent, but only because more people gave up looking for work.
The Labor Department said Friday that the economy added just 115,000 jobs in April. That’s below March’s upwardly revised 154,000 jobs and far fewer than the pace from earlier this year.
The unemployment rate has fallen a full percentage point since August to a three-year low. But last month’s decline was not due to job growth. The government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work.
In April, the percentage of adults working or looking for work fell to the lowest level in more than 30 years.
Employers added an average of 252,000 jobs per month from December through February, a burst of hiring that raised hopes the economy would accelerate. But job gains have averaged only 135,000 in the two months since then.
The slowdown will heighten fears that high gas prices and sluggish income growth are weighing on the broader economy.
Average hourly wages rose a penny in April, to $23.38. They have increased 1.8 percent over the past year, trailing the rate of inflation.
The economy must create at least 125,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth. It generally takes twice that number on a consistent basis to rapidly lower the unemployment rate.
Weak job gains pose a threat to President Barack Obama’s reelection. He is likely to face voters this fall with the highest unemployment rate of any president since World War II.
Economists surveyed by the Associated Press said hiring should be sufficient to push the unemployment rate below 8 percent by Election Day. The 32 economists surveyed by the AP see steady job gains averaging 177,000 a month for the rest of this year. That should be enough to lower the unemployment rate to 7.9 percent by November.
There have been some signs that hiring will improve.
The number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell last week by the most in a year, the government said Thursday. That figure was released after the government compiled its April report. But it could bode well for hiring in May.
And earlier this week, the Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group, said factory activity grew at the fastest pace in 10 months and a gauge of manufacturing employment showed that hiring jumped.
Still, service companies expanded in April at the slowest pace in four months, according to a separate ISM survey. And the group said hiring at those companies, which employ roughly 90 percent of the work force, slowed.
The economy expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter, down from 3 percent growth in the fourth quarter. Economists polled by the AP forecast the economy will grow 2.5 percent this year. In a healthy economy, that would be considered average. But faster growth is needed to spur greater job creation.
Obama is leading us to hell so fast it is unreal.
And he’s actually taking credit for it. Because as thousands more Americans simply give up in abject despair of finding a job in his failed economy, it artificially reduces the unemployment rate because people who give up are no longer counted.
Which means literally that the more people Obama drives into total despair, the better – at least for Obama:
“The unemployment rate ticked down again,” Obama said during a speech
And the most dishonest, most vile media propaganda since Joseph Goebbels helped give the world the Nazi Party is helping him to do it. One blogger contemplating the destruction of jobs as measured by labor participation underscores this fact with some quotes from 1984:
“the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.”…George Orwell, “1984″
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”…George Orwell, “1984″
Eighty-eight MILLION Americans have been driven out of the workforce under this presidency. Unemployment would be over ELEVEN PERCENT if we calcuated unemployment at the same labor partipation rate that George Bush had when he left office. When the rate was at 65.76 not all that long ago, unemployment would have been at 10.9 percent; Obama has now driven the percentage of Americans participating in the labor force down to 63.6 percent.
“The civilian labor force participation rate declined in April to 63.6 percent, while the employment-population ratio, at 58.4 percent, changed little.” — BLS statistics, May 4, 2012
For men, the labor participation rate is now 70% – the lowest it has EVER been since records started being kept in 1948. Democrats love to talk about “the war on women” when they have a war on men that is simply beyond unreal.
THE REAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE UNDER THIS PRESIDENT IS 11.6 PERCENT:
Real U-3 Unemployment Rate: 11.6%
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/04/2012 10:02 -0400Propaganda unemployment rate: 8.1%; Real unemployment rate: 11.6%. Reason for difference: organic growth of labor force which grows alongside the broader population. Don’t be confused by cheap explanations on TV why the labor force should be declining (especially with ZIRP meaning pre-retirement workers have to stay in the labor force ever longer to supplant their meager fixed income): the widely accepted definition of the labor pool, that used by the CBO and all other government forecasting agencies, assumes a 90,000 growth in the labor force every month as it has to keep in line with the growth of the US population! The implication is simple: using a real labor force participation rate long-term average of 65.8%, the real unemployment rate in April was 11.6%, based on the 5.4 million additional workers that should be counted as part of the U-3 which then means that the real number of unemployed is not 12.5 million but 17.9 million, which in turn implies a 11.6% unemployment rate in the US. This also means that the spread between the propaganda, and the real number is now 3.5%: the most it has been since the early 1980s.
It was said during the Great Depression that it really wasn’t so bad – as long as you had a job.
If you don’t have a job, or if you lose your job – as more Americans are losing their jobs every day now – Barack Obama is the worst enemy you ever had in your life. If you lose your job, Barack Obama will crush you under his foot and when you give up bothering to look, Obama will tout the disaster that he has made of your life into a “success” as the bogus unemployment rate “drops.”
As I said in the title, PLEASE LOOK AT HISTORY!!! Because since Obama touted his massisvely failed stimulus, everything he said would happen turned out to be a lie, and everything conservatives predicted turned out to be TRUE. Here is a chart of the Obama stimulus, with lines showing what was predicted by Obama versus REALITY:
When you examine Obama’s very own predictions, he promised America that if his stimulus passed (and, uh, it did, you know) unemployment would be at 6 percent today. But if we DIDN’T pass his stumulus, things would be worse and unemployment would be higher – at about 6.7 percent today. AND EVEN BY THE MOST BOGUS CALCULATION UNEMPLOYMENT WITH OBAMA’S STIMULUS IS FAR WORSE THAN OBAMA SAID IT WOULD BE WITHOUT HIS DAMN STIMULUS.
Obama is now selling another whopping snake-oil lie by claiming that the answer to prosperity is more damn taxes on producers to punish them for daring to produce. If we eliminated our military budget, if we eliminated all of our discretionary spending, if we added Obama’s deceitful “Buffett rule,” we STILL wouldn’t be able to overcome OBAMA’S MASSIVE FEDERAL BUDGET DEFICIT. This truly evil man is ruining us.
Please look at history and wake UP, damn it. Stop being the proverbial lemming who follows his leader off the cliff! Stop being the proverbial frog in the pot of wter who allows himself to be boiled to death.
The reality is that Obama has created a holocaust. And just as has tragically happened in the past, and just like the book 1984 examined, the bad guys are hiding it.
Next year, if Obama gets re-elected, the labor participation rate – measuring the number of working-age Americans who actually have JOBS – will be the lowest since Carter. And the fact that there won’t be any Ronald Reagan to fix it, combined with the true disaster Obama has compiled and will continue to compile, will be enough to bury this country.
Update, August 2, 2013: The Labor Participation Rate has plummeted another half a percent (which amounts to millions of jobs lost) since my last entry. It stands at 63.4%, We are now even beyond the territory of failed president Jimmy Carter. We’re now in the territory of the worst participation rate since World War II ended. And yes, as that author notes, had this happened during the fifth year of Reagan, it would have been described in terms of a holocaust; but it’s in the fifth year of Obama, so it is being lauded.
Update: May 2, 2014 – The labor force participation rate has now declined to 62.8%, the lowest level in 36 years since 1978.
Update, September 10, 2014 – Yeah, it’s STILL 62.8%.
Start Thinking Right 
May 7, 2012 at 12:07 pm
I’ve seen that last graph posted a few times before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed that even by Obama’s (econ advisor’s) predictions unemployment would have been the same by 2014 with or without the “stimulus.” The difference being, without it, we wouldn’t have spent/borrowed over a trillion dollars.
May 7, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Good observation, Mr. Owl.
But let’s not forget that over all, THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN WORSE WITH THE STIMULUS THAN TEAM OBAMA SAID WE WOULD HAVE IF WE’D DONE NOTHING.
And, of course, doing nothing would have saved us $3.27 TRILLION.
March 11, 2015 at 5:55 am
Thanks, Mr. Owl and Mr. Eden! Now all that’s left is for the actually productive part of the private sector to take on the burden to pay it back. So, “Pay it forward” has really become “Pay it back”.
March 11, 2015 at 2:08 pm
Tomato Cain,
You must be a liberal. Nobody else is crazy enough to blame Obama’s nearly $4 trillion “stimulus” on the private sector and make it all about business rather than the corrupt government fascists who put the money in their grubby hands to begin with.
I remember the bank bailout. Many banks DID NOT WANT the federal money BUT WERE FORCED TO ACCEPT IT because the federal government wanted to treat the entire industry the same and not allow the public to know which banks were sick (and therefore getting bailouts) and which were healthy (and therefore did not need bailouts).
Ultimately, the crony capitalism- whereby we take money from one person/group and give it to another person/group – is the fault of liberal Democrats and those who vote for the liberal Democrats.