Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped by 24,000 last week to 399,000 as more workers lost their jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday. At the same time, the economy continues to lose workers.
In the 30 months since the recession officially ended, nearly 1 million people have dropped out of the labor force — they aren’t working, and they aren’t looking — according to data from Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past two months, the labor force shrank by 170,000.
This is virtually unprecedented in past economic recoveries, at least since the BLS has kept detailed records. In the past nine recoveries, the labor force had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point, according to an IBD analysis of the BLS data.
“Given weak job prospects, many would-be workers dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force,” noted Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in her analysis of the BLS jobs report issued last Friday. “That reduces the measured unemployment rate but does not represent real improvement.”
According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago.
If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.
More at IBD
Bush was losing 700,000 jobs a month when he left office. The GOP has destroyed thousands of jobs in the public sector. Obama as increased job growth in the private sector every month! Stop lying.
How about the facts:
Bush/Obama Defecit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2011/07/25/Blogs/ezra-klein/StandingArt/debt%20changes%20under%20bush%20obama.jpg?uuid=qZCizrbZEeCYzBMQCYwsyQ
Bush/Obama job growth:
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4edfe187eab8eaab3600001b/chart-unemployment-rate-and-jobs-added-during-the-great-recession-dec-7-2011.jpg
Zombie over at PJMedia figured it out.
Visualize economics as two types of jobs:
“Productive jobs,” involve the creation of new things: manufacturing, inventing, designing, building, extracting raw materials, and so on.
“Maintenance jobs,” involve preserving a pleasant and safe civilizational environment: policing, service jobs, cleaning, health care, and so forth.
These “maintenance jobs” are less glamorous but they are just as essential to the economy, because they create and maintain a status quo in which productiveness can be achieved.
Yet Obama and his crack team of economists have now dreamt up a third kind of job:
The “destructive job.”
Obama’s destructive employment program involves the hiring of bureaucrats to stifle and crush entrepreneurialism and the free market; technicians to install machinery which makes doing business more difficult and expensive; IRS agents to squeeze more and more money from the dwindling number of productive Americans; and public servants whose job is to remove as many people as they can from the employment market by enslaving them to addictive lifelong entitlements like Food Stamps and unending unemployment benefits.
Yup.
Obama proposes that we “create jobs” by employing people to prevent the creation of jobs.
Hiring people to implement economy-destroying EPA regulations — and then touting this dubious strategy as a way to “create jobs” — is the equivalent of hiring thousands of men to drive steamrollers over America’s farmlands.
Not only have we lowered unemployment by creating thousands of new Steamroller Driver positions, but we’ve created more jobs in the agricultural sector as well, since the farmers now have to hire workers to re-plant all their crops!
How could Obama’s brilliant plan have resulted in the disappearance of a million jobs?
It is obviously beyond his ability to figure out.
Wish we could make Obama vanish.
@liberalmann: 0-bama lied and our economy died. Don’t give me that job creation crap or blame Bush excuse. It’s lame and old and 0-bama along with DW slut has said they own this economy. Remember the graph your boy put up that said what the unemployment rate would be by now?? Seems like you remember to blame Bush but somehow forget what your messiah said. You are a pathetic loser.