Forget The Obama Hype, This Was A Very Bad Jobs Report

Obama will once again hit the airways and tell us how many consecutive months he's had job creation under his "plan" and, as usual, he will also say that his Administration has created x-million jobs.  But all that is just so much political B.S.  You have to ask yourself this simple question: "If the unemployment rate rose last month, how is it possible that the economy could have actually added 163,000 new jobs?"  The answer is as simple as the question.  The workforce size was being manipulated.

Here are the "real" facts.  For 42 consecutive months, the unemployment rate has been above 8%.  In the last 4 months, the rate has gone "up" from 8.1% in April to 8.2% in May; and, from 8.2% in June to 8.3% in July.  That's the wrong direction.  When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.6%. At the same time, the workforce size was 154.2 million and there were 11.6 million unemployed.  Today, the workforce size is 155 million workers and the unemployed number is 12.8 million.  Net those numbers all together and you would find that the economy actually lost 400,000 jobs since Obama took office; not created them.  The bottom line is that you couldn't have created x-million jobs when, on a net basis, our economy actually lost jobs.

Finally, let's not forget this propagandist chart that the President's economic team put together to justify a near trillion dollars in stimulus spending:

Click on graph for enlarged view

According to the chart, the stimulus was to keep unemployment under 7.9%; and, that, by now, the unemployment rate should be around 5.6%.  Instead, the economy did even worse than what Obama said it would do without stimulus.  Without stimulus, unemployment was supposed to top out at 9%.  In actuality, with stimulus, the unemployment rate hit 10.2%.  Without stimulus, today's unemployment rate was projected to be at about 6%.  Yet, for months, the stimulus has kept us consistently above 8%.  And, now, it's rising again..

Here's a Daily News story on the jobs report: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/weak-hiring-expected-fourth-straight-month-article-1.1128191

The Bogus Baby Boomer Retirement Argument For Record Low Workforce Participation Rates Under Obama

Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates what percentage of our population is working.  Today,  that number is at historical lows.  At every turn, Republicans make sure that the voters know this. Of course, people on the left don't like them to know that number because increasing record lows in the workforce participation rate discredits the highly manipulated and supposedly falling unemployment rate.

So, lately, left-leaning economists and Obama apologists have been floating the belief that the workforce is actually getting smaller because baby boomers are retiring at a faster rate than the population is growing. Those people doing the arguing always point back to that overused  statement: "starting in 2011, ten thousand baby boomers will retire each day over the next nineteen years."

Of course, having dealt with statistics for most of my college life and business career, I have always had problems with nicely rounded numbers like 10,000 a day.  To me, a number like that is often more political than statistical.  Further, that number, contrary to usually compounded population growth, is assumed to be unrealistically constant over that period of 19 years.  And, that just can't be.

In 1946, the first year of the baby boom, 2.738 million baby's were born.  So, theoretically, if none died, you would have slightly more than 7,500 babies per day hitting age 65 in 2011.   Not the 10,000 a day number that is being tossed around.  But, depending on what study you look at, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of those born in 1946 would die before reaching age 65.  After all, the life expectancy for someone born that year was only 66.7 years.  So, best case, by using the 30% factor, only about 1.9 million of the original 2.738 million who were born in 1946 would still be around in 2011 and reach that ripe old reach age of 65.  Therefore, more realistically, you would have about 5,200 boomers turning 65 each day in 2011; almost half that ridiculous 10,000 a day number.  At the same time, 2011 should have added about 2.751 million new workers to the labor force; just due to the population additions that occured in the 20, or so, preceding years.

Now, call me crazy, but, what I have shown, above, seems to contest the belief that, somehow, the smaller workforce size is all due baby boomers retiring.  And, this is before you even consider the fact that many "age-sixty-fivers" are hardly in a financial position to retire; having lost 40% of their wealth  in the last 5 years.  Nor does my workforce calculation take into consideration that the U.S. allows 1.1 million people per year to lawfully enter the country on a permanent basis; and, of that, about 800,000 are of working age and should have entered the workforce in 2011.

The reality is that a lot of people have just given up looking for work under Obama's stewardship.  A fact that the left just won't admit. As for the baby boomers...?  Their impact will be to slow the "net" growth of the workforce.  Not to shrink it.