Quote:
Originally Posted by cachibatches
Dear lord, it has been explained to you now three times, and it is not that difficult.
The workforce participation rate is so poor that a slight uptick in the unemployment rate is not of any real consequence. We went from terrible to horrible. If you are proud of that, then good for you. Most people understand that it is a canard, and it doesn't have to be explained to them 3-4 times.
The workforce participation rate is at catastrophically bad levels. Get off of MSNBC and spend a few minutes looking through realclearmarkets and see what economists have to say about this on an almost daily basis. There is no putting lipstick on this pig.
Even liberal defenders have to admit that discouraged workers are a part of the problem:
...This is where the critics of Obama—to the extent that he actually is responsible for the slow pace of recovery—might appear to have a legitimate point. Some folks do appear to have dropped out of the workforce all together. The BLS counts a category of people called discouraged workers (fifth chart)—those who haven’t looked for a job in the past four weeks, specifically because they believe there aren’t any jobs for them. Even though they want work, these people aren’t counted as part of the labor force because they’re not actively looking.
And, indeed, years into the economic recovery, the number of discouraged workers remains high. This is related to “unusual aspects of the slow recovery that led workers to become discouraged and permanently drop out of the labor force,” wrote the CBO. |
In your mind what would be a good LFPR rate?
The numbers of discouraged workers, as tracked by the BLS, who are no longer counted in the work force has ranged from a low of 5.6 million to a high of 7.0 million (in 2012) since Jan 2009. The April 2015 number is 6.3 million. The lowest number BLS has published for discouraged workers is 4.3 million in Jan 2000.
If you take 2 million off the current number and move them into the workforce you get a LFPR of 63.6% [(2,000+157,072)/250266=63.56%].
63.6% is well below the previous high LFPR of 67.3%. As I have stated previously, the LFPR rate will not be returning to the previous highs anytime in the near future even with a robust economy.
If you do the same calculation for the U3 unemployment rate and assume none of the 2 million find a job then you get an U3 number of 6.7% [(2,000+8,549)/157,072=6.71%].
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