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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (107023)	1/6/2012 9:48:43 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 149317

Good points. Here's what worries me though: Average Duration Of Unemployment: Second Highest Ever At 40.8 Week Yep, things have been really bad, the great recession. And the last recovery was tepid at best. And people's cognitive bias is always to extrapolate current and recent events into the future. The thing is I remember many recessions in my life, and most times the growth was explosive coming out. And almost always, people were super gloomy and nobody was predicting it. I'm not predicting it now, but it's in the realm since it's happened more often than not.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (107023)	1/6/2012 11:09:03 AM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 149317

Anyone want to peer behind the employment reports to understand what is really going on? Check out the analysis below. It's pretty good. Remember, the headline Unemployment rate of 8.5%, even though it is improving, isn't telling the whole story. Why is it improving? What is relevant to an improving economy? Well, the unemployment rate is improving NOT because more people are employed with rising wages, but rather, it is improving because more people are dropping out of the workforce either because they are discourage or because they decided to retire. This is disastrous for the US economy. It lowers our tax revenue base and it increases overall gov't expenditures, which widens the deficit and increases our debt, which increases interest payments, which crowds out public service and private spending. Not good at all. My friends, THAT is why we have to make sure we really understand what is going on, rather than just take the government's word for it when they say things are improving because the headline unemployment rate is improving. Three words for you to watch going forward: LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE (aka Employment Rate of the Population). This is far more important than UNEMPLOYMENT RATE. See further analysis below. ------------------ The Employment Situation Here it is..... Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 in December, and the unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent, continued to trend down, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in transportation and warehousing, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and mining. Uh huh. Let's see what we actually have in here. Heh the annualized doesn't look so bad eh? But look at the blue dashed line -- that's not so good. And we need to dig into that and figure out what's up, because I don't like that trend at all. Ok, so the actual number of employed people went down. Hmmmmm. "Not in labor force" went down slightly as a trend (that is, the slope decreased), but increased numerically. How about the employment rate -- *the most-important number in there, since it controls the taxing capacity of the government.* That's not good -- it's down a touch and has flat-lined now for basically two years. Here's the problem with this report -- the non-institutional working-age population went from 240.441 million to 240.584, a gain of 143,000 people of working age. But the number of employed people went down from 141.070 million to 140.681 -- a loss of 389,000. Adding the two, which is the correct way to look at it, *the economy on a population-adjusted basis lost 532,000 jobs.*