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One of the variables sometimes discussed and other times not is that the baby boomer wave is here and we have started retiring and leaving the job market. As the stock market has recovered over the last couple of years and nest eggs restored some who delayed retirement are now back able to and doing so. I am part of the BLS census study and have been for over a year and it took awhile to convince them we were really retired and not just out of a job. Still is something that is a tad ambiguous when considered.
I guess it's worth noting... Domestic manufacturing output has been very stable and growing for the past 3 years. 2012 was kinda average. This year started kinda slow, but it is really starting to take up right about now. Manufacturing is generally considered to be one of the leading indicators of the health of the economy, and usually one of the first to signal a recovery.
Problem is, we are seeing the recovery in all the wrong places. Wages have been stagnant, and declining for many. All the wealth is pooling at the top. The rich are far more efficient at getting richer these days. This is not a rich bashing rant. This is a fact of the matter rant.
I think the US economy is being massively propped up.
-For example the US postal service employs 574,000 people!! On wikipedia, it says its the nations second largest civilian employer. Have you noticed how little mail you get now days? It's virtually nothing. Fliers and a few regular pieces of mail.
Mail could easily go down to 3 or 4 days a week. The mail volume in the last 10 years has gone down by some incredible amount.
And the general trend towards automation, the internet, the "knowledge economy", whatever you want to call it...it doesnt seem very good for regular civilian employment.
I read somewhere that the percent of males employed in this country is at some crazy low level. If you compare it from 1970 to now, its like 95% vs 70%. And we're suppose to believe the economy keeps growing?
Plus all the monkeying from the FED (i.e. buying treasury bonds), the real economy underneath is atrocious. Basically on life support. I bet since the 70's, our economic growth has been half real growth, half welfare, or manipulation/changing the numbers around (i.e. how unemployment is calculated).
No go back to your CNBC messages, lol.
While employment of women is much higher than 1970.
While employment of women is much higher than 1970.
True, but the numbers overall seem nuts.
-For example, teens and those under 25 employment is very low.
The employment of women is much higher than 30-40 years....but aren't women paid less than men? You've always heard that. They make 70 or 80 cents on the dollar vs men.
The highest income earning part of the economy keeps going down, but the economy is suppose to keep growing at 3 or 4% a year?
Then the big increase in food stamp use, welfare in the last 5-7 years. I think some states have almost 20% of the population using food stamps. When food stamp use goes below where it was in 2006 or 07, I might start believing in a real recovery.
I just pulled up one state's statistics to get a glimpse at the change in food stamp usage:
POCATELLO, Idaho -
The State Department of Health and Welfare reported Monday that the number of Idahoans using food stamps has sky-rocketed by 270 percent from 2007. That means about one in six people in the state need government assistance to buy food.
As of November, there were 235,000 Idahoans on food stamps, compared with 80,000 five years ago.
if that's a recovery, I would hate to see a recession.
I ran some numbers on this for the Dayton metro area, and this number was going up even before the recession. This is a long term trend reflecting more and more households becoming eligible for assistance. The recession just really spiked the trend upward...but it was going up anyway.
While employment of women is much higher than 1970.
This is how famliies stayed in the middle class and fought off downward mobility, when real wages started to stagnate, which started around 1970-71.
In the past it was customary for the wife stayed at home while the men worked. After 1970, certainly after 1974, more and more, you needed two incomes to pay for a generic suburban lifestyle.
With this recession, being a two-income household probably saved a lot of families from going under.
The wealthy got hit the hardest in the Recession for obvious reasons. They have/get most of their wealth in the markets and that got tanked. Staying put they also obviously came back the most and the quickest. There are more studies and articles about it to read for a life time. The housing market got hit and is coming back much slower. Middle class families etc had their wealth in housing thus the wealth gap has gotten greater.
This is blatently untrue. Income for the top tiers has risen dramatically as has net worth while both catagories for the lower classes has deminished.
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