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

To: Road Walker who wrote (122850)	10/6/2012 11:47:04 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

I think you're right! As the fat bulge of baby boomers retires, hiring should accelerate. economix.blogs.nytimes.com "To be sure, many of the those in the baby-boom generation have had to delay retirement, since the nest eggs they call “houses” have turned out to be worth much less than believed a few years ago. But even so, many workers are retiring, offsetting the number of young workers newly entering the labor force. That means on net that the labor force probably will not grow as quickly as it did in years past, and so fewer payroll jobs are needed to absorb new entrants to the labor force each month. Typically the figure economists cite as the minimum number of additional jobs needed to keep the unemployment rate flat is about 150,000 to 200,000. But economists at Barclays Capital, who have been analyzing how the graying of America may affect employment trends, estimate that going forward 75,000 to 100,000 jobs added per month may be sufficient. The bottom line is that the path back to full employment is going to be long and scary no matter what. But if you think Boomers are leaving the job market relatively quickly, that slog starts to look a little less painful."

To: Road Walker who wrote (122850)	10/6/2012 12:18:15 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Respond to of 149317

I agree. My neighborhood (consisting of 12 homes), two unemployed folks got permanent jobs last month and got off unemployment. I am retired, but I continue to provide engineering consulting. So I do not know how the BLS views me. I have seen a big increase in the demand on my consulting time. 2 weeks from now, I see coming a conflict in my consulting time. This tells me that factories are picking up. Tesla motors here in CA is hiring big time and they are stealing folks from GM plants in the mid West. Know a guy who is moving back to Tesla (ex GM worker in the plant who was laid off when GM closed.) I wonder who these armchair number crunchers are. They need to get off their ass and do some productive labor instead of tweeting and number crunching.

To: Road Walker who wrote (122850)	10/6/2012 6:56:20 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 5-7, 2012 In the Land of Discouraged Workers The Bad News in the New Jobs Report by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor force.” According to the BLS, “In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” These individuals “wanted and were available for work,” but “they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.” In other words, 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed. The stock market rose on the faux good news. Bloomberg’s headline: “ U.S. Stocks Rise as Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Drops.” A truer picture of the dire employment situation is provided by the 600,000 rise over the previous month in involuntary part-time workers. According to the BLS, “These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” Turning to the 114,000 new jobs, once again the jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic service jobs that cannot be exported. Manufacturing jobs declined by 16,000. As has been the case for a decade, two categories–health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services) and waitresses and bartenders account for 53% of the new jobs. The BLS never ceases to find ever growing employment of people in restaurants and bars despite the rising dependence of the US population on food stamps. The elderly are rising as a percentage of the American population, but I sometimes wonder if employment in ambulatory health care services is rising faster than the elderly population. Whether these reported jobs are real, I do not know. The rest of the new jobs were accounted for by retail trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities (primarily credit intermediation), professional and business services (primarily administrative and waste services), and state government education, where the 13,600 reported new jobs seem odd in light of the teacher layoffs and rise in classroom size. The high-tech jobs that economists promised would be our reward for offshoring American manufacturing jobs and tradable professional services, such as software engineering and IT, have never materialized. “The New Economy” was just another hoax, like “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” and “Iranian nukes.” While employment falters, the consumer price index (CPI-U) in August increased 0.6 percent, the largest since June 2009. If the August rate is annualized, it means bad news on the inflation front. Instead of bringing us high tech jobs, is “the New Economy” bringing back the stagflation of the late 1970s? Time will tell. Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.

To: Road Walker who wrote (122850)

10/6/2012 8:27:28 PM

From: John Vosilla

Respond to of 149317

So what I think is happening is that the boomers are just starting to leave the workforce. That drives down the unemployment rate. At the same time, they have to be replaced, thus 800k more people working. But they're mostly existing jobs, thus only 140k new jobs created.

The exact beginning and end of the baby boom can be debated. In the United States, demographers usually use 1946 to 1964, although the U.S. birthrate began to shoot up in 1941 and to decline after 1957. By 1948, the US population increase was back to the pre-Depression increase rate of about 1.5% per year. Some sources place the beginning as early as 1944. [5] The following table shows changes in US population during the period of US involvement in World War II and for the five years thereafter, based on US census information. [6]

Year US resident population (thousands) Net change(thousands) Percent change

1941	133,121	1,161	0.88
1942	133,920	799	0.60
1943	134,245	325	0.24
1944	132,885	-1,360	-1.01
1945	132,481	-404	-0.30
1946	140,054	7,573	5.72
1947	143,446	3,392	2.42
1948	146,093	2,647	1.85
1949	148,665	2,572	1.76
1950	151,868	3,203	2.15
10 year average	-	1,991	1.43

en.wikipedia.org

To: Road Walker who wrote (122850)	10/7/2012 7:24:02 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

I think you are on to something. It sounds about right. Check out this article from CNN also... -------------- Why the unemployment rate won't keep dropping By Stephen Gandel, senior editor October 5, 2012: 3:11 PM ET finance.fortune.cnn.com In September, the politically charged rate fell because of a huge jump in a survey that few economists trust. FORTUNE -- It was either an average month for job growth, or one of the best months in nearly three decades. In the September jobs numbers, there was evidence for both. Last month, employers said they added 114,000 workers to their payrolls. Not fast by any means, but not bad. The unemployment rate, however, was a blockbuster. In September, the unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, down from 8.1%. That's the lowest it has been since Obama took office. MORE: Fiscal cliff could cost 277,000 jobs So is the recovery at stall speed, or finally taking off? The answer lies in how the unemployment rate is calculated. The numbers come from a survey of individuals. The unemployment rate can go down because more people have jobs. Great. But it can also go down if a growing number of people say they have given up looking for work. Not so great. And for much of the past year the bulk of the reason for the drop in the unemployment rate, which peaked at 10% in late 2009, has been the shrinking workforce. That changed last month. The workforce, for the first time in years, grew by a lot, up 418,000. What's more, the number of people in the U.S. who said they were unemployed dropped by 456,000. The result was one of the fastest drops in the unemployment rate not only in Obama's presidency, but also the past few decades. The problem is add those two numbers up, and the economy appears to have added 873,000 jobs in September alone. That pace of job growth, though, seems impossibly high, especially when you consider other measures of the economy. For instance, GDP is growing just 1.3%. That suggests job growth of about 125,000, not seven times that fast. What's more, the household survey jumps around a lot. Which is why, other than looking at the unemployment rate, most economists tend not to pay a lot of attention to it. And the number this month seems more questionable than usual. September is always an odd month when it comes to the workforce. It's when high school and college students go back to school. To account for that, the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes seasonal adjustments, upping the number of teenagers and young adults in the workforce. But something weird happened this year. Fed up with a tough job market, it appears student workers dropped out earlier than usual. The number of 16-to-24 year-olds in the workforce fell by more than 1 million in August. September, then, not surprisingly, had a much smaller drop than usual. That didn't stop the government, though, from making its seasonal adjustments. All told, the Labor Department says seasonally adjusted there were 448,000 more teenagers and young adults in the workforce in September than there were in August. At best, that's likely an overstatement. Either way, it accounts for the entire jump in the workforce and then some. What about the other 425,000 jobs that were added in the month? Well, there's some evidence to believe that number is inflated as well. The number of people who took part-time jobs because they couldn't find full-time work rose by 582,000. So those people get counted as employed, but they certainly don't have the jobs they want. Here's what's probably going on: Up until this month, the household survey has been showing weaker job growth than the survey of employers and other economic data. What we saw in September was probably a catch up for that. Combine this month with the past five, and you get an average job growth over the past six months of 157,000. That's about what survey of employers shows job growth to be and only slightly higher than the number implied by the GDP. A number of conspiracy theorists have been saying that the White House doctored the unemployment rate to make sure it slipped below 8% right before the election. In fact, it appears that the unemployment rate has been inflated for some time, and that Obama should have gotten credit for getting the jobless number below 8% months ago. But what's also true is that now that we have gotten below 8%, the unemployment rate is unlikely to drop much more anytime soon. For that, the economy would have to be producing much more than 150,000 jobs a month. Any suggestion that the recovery remains anything other than sluggish, still appears to be an economic, and numerical, mirage.