“February Payrolls Surge To 295K, Smash Expectations Of 235K, Unemployment Rate Drops To 5.5%”
Everything is great ya all!
But hidden in the report is the fact that a massive 354,000 people left the labor force in February.
and:
“Americans Not In The Labor Force Rise To Record 92.9 Million As Participation Rate Declines Again”
The labor force participation rate hovered between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent in the eleven months from April 2014 through February, and has been 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013.
Prior to that, the last time the rate was below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent, the same rate it was in February.
Oh, can’t forget this:
It has become a running joke: month after month after month, the punditry says wages hikes are coming… they are coming any second, just be patient. And month after month the punditry refuses to accept the simple reason why not even the BLS’ goalseeked data does not permit this long awaited wage surge to take place – simply said, the quality of jobs (or rather “jobs” as these are all merely 1s and 0s that only exist in some BLS spreadsheet) added every month is absolutely atrocious, so bad that not even the BLS’ actuarial tables allow its goalseek program to attribute higher wages to the “jobs” it creates out of thin statistical air.
Ironically moments ago US labor secretary Thomas Perez said that the “quality of jobs is going up.”
No it isn’t, as anyone who spends even two minutes with the BLS report can find out.
Don’t have two minutes? Here is the full breakdown. As the chart below shows, the three biggest single-category jobs added in February (because Professional services includes numerous occupations), were also the three lowest quality, lowest paying ones:
Leisure and Hospitality, added 66K jobs
Education and Health added 54K
Retail trade added 32KTogether these three job categories accounted for 152K jobs, or more than half the total February job gains. They also represent the lowest paid jobs in the US.
But don’t worry, everything is great.
Let’s see what we find in the (relatively uncooked section) of the data.
This raw data looks pretty good; 566,000 jobs, according to the household survey, were added and the change in not-in-labor-force was very close to zero.
But — the annualized change less the workforce addition rate remains tiny — positive, but very small, at only 170,000.
This, unfortunately, means that despite the so-called “headline” unemployment number moving down (strongly!) the population:employment ratio, which is the only figure that matters when it comes to government funding sustainability as you can only tax working people, remains in the ditch.
Keep our heads buried in the sand MSM….that’ll fix everything.
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