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6 + figure income estimates range from under 20% to around 30%. Data can be manipulated to show whatever is desirable to whichever entity is collecting/publishing the data. Furthermore, even if the 30% estimate is correct, a country where only 1/3rd of households are doing well, while 2/3rds are not, is in decline. If you add senior citizens who are on fixed incomes without meaningful COLA increases, statistics change yet again, and not in a positive direction.
I just read the source paper cited in that WSJ piece. It's fudged because the source paper uses a "household of 3" equivalent. They're including single person households making $60K and married-no-kids households making $81K in that $100K group.
The point of the paper was to show that this particular group in the top third is gaining ground and everybody else is going backwards. The WSJ spun this in a misleading way. The group making a "real" inflation-adjusted 6 figure+ household income is growing but it's 20%, not 1/3. Serves me right for not digging deeper into a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication. The WSJ didn't used to do that. I guess I now have to treat it like Fox News.
I just read the source paper cited in that WSJ piece. It's fudged because the source paper uses a "household of 3" equivalent. They're including single person households making $60K and married-no-kids households making $81K in that $100K group.
The point of the paper was to show that this particular group in the top third is gaining ground and everybody else is going backwards. The WSJ spun this in a misleading way. The group making a "real" inflation-adjusted 6 figure+ household income is growing but it's 20%, not 1/3. Serves me right for not digging deeper into a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication. The WSJ didn't used to do that. I guess I now have to treat it like Fox News.
A lot of articles are like this.
Once you dig into the actual information, it is massaged to say what they want it to say or to push their biased agenda.
Long term unemployed is a huge problem, but for the most part, employers won't hire them. Even when the person has the education and qualifications, the very fact they are long term unemployed makes them "unqualified". It's too bad employers just brand them that way. No doubt lots of them would make good employees.
Short of local, state and the federal government putting them to work, most are now unemployable and will probably never work again.
Then this should be a number one priority for our politicians to address, since the private sector has forsaken these people.
It always goes up a lot in July. The seasonalized data for LTE is noisy if you look at it each month.
Probably a lot of those people who left their jobs in the establishment survey in June and were captured in the payroll systems in July. Many of them were probably workers in school systems who retired. Some of them are seeking work.
3.8 million boomers turn 65 each year. Their labor force participation rate drops from 65% to 20%. In addition, you have people turning 55-64 where the rate drops from 85% to 65%.
Hmph. We shall see. If that U6 rate doesn't start going down fast over the next three months our unemployment rate is going to be identical for a whole year, with identical labor force participation. We could created 50 million jobs and it doesn't mean a thing if the U6 unemployment rate remains this high.
Hmph. We shall see. If that U6 rate doesn't start going down fast over the next three months our unemployment rate is going to be identical for a whole year, with identical labor force participation. We could created 50 million jobs and it doesn't mean a thing if the U6 unemployment rate remains this high.
Different bubble this time. It's concentrated in inflating existing assets, not that favorable for jobs. 1996-2000 created a lot of redundant jobs since many companies formed as a result of telco deregulation to attempt to take away business from RBOC's and long-distance carriers. That created a lot of demand for the buildout of networks. There were also the many startups for internet and biotech which flamed out. See the article below that came out at the peak of the Nasdaq bubble.
2003-2006 Housing bubble created an investment bubble in real estate. As a result, construction of new homes is only required at a much lower level. A lot of unskilled labor was needed to construct homes and work in the housing finance industry.
U-6 will probably stay higher than in the past peaks. 77 million boomers are retiring from 2010-2029. Rates will continue to stay too low to support normal retirement withdrawal rates.
On its population clock, the Census Bureau estimates that the US population on August 5, 2016, at 4:49 p.m. ET (yup, down to the minute) was 324.17 million.
That’s up from 308.76 million in April 2010. Since the darkest days of the Great Recession, the US population has grown by 15.4 million.
The Census Bureau also estimates that there are currently 8.6 births per minute, minus 4.6 deaths per minute, plus 2 arriving immigrants (“net”) per minute, for a gain of nearly 6 folks per minute. Everyone ages, so the young ones move into the labor force, but the baby boomers are fit and healthy and don’t feel like retiring, and so they hang on to their jobs for as long as they can, despite the rampant age discrimination they face in many sectors, particularly in tech, though obviously not in politics.
In 2010, 24% of the people were under 18. That was 74 million people. Millions of them have since moved into the labor force, elbowing each other while scrambling for jobs, as have those millions who were then between 18 and their twenties and in college or grad school. These millennials have arrived on the job market in very large numbers.
In April 2010, there were 130.1 million nonfarm payrolls. In today’s July report, there were 144.4 million. Hence, 14.3 million jobs have been added to the economy over the time span, even as the total population has grown by 15.4 million. So that’s not working out very well.
On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.
So clearly, for individuals who aren’t lucky, the employment math is very tough. The Bureau of Labor Statistics attempts to capture this dismal condition with its Employment-Population Ratio. It measures the proportion of employed persons to the civilian non-institutional population aged 16 years and over.
That's an interesting perspective. I don't think I've ever read that view from any economist.
Demographic trend is not a government policy.
It would be more relevant if he presented data that was adjusted for the change in the median age. There are graphs out there for median income by age groups, but none I know that display employment income adjusted for aging of the population.
At the same time, every credible macro-econometric model of the US economy points to increased immigration as the key to economic growth.
It kind of depends on who is immigrating. If it's the smart, motivated people then sure. Walk around the MIT, Cal Tech, or UC Berkeley campus playing "spot the white person" game. The people who are going to be driving the US economy in 20 years will largely have Asian/Indian ancestry. If it's Fidel Castro emptying the prisons and mental hospitals or equivalent, then probably not. The world has 4 billion poor people. They can't all come here. We have a huge glut of unskilled labor in this country. Sure, the people born here with no job skills don't want to work and somebody needs to pick the lettuce and dig the ditches but we probably need to have quotas on that kind of immigration. The smart, motivated ones are what we want since they drive the economy.
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Only if you "own the country", so the more people there are, the more you own.