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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (919205)	2/4/2016 5:00:32 PM
From: jlallen	1 Recommendation Recommended By locogringo Respond to of 1573711

You will need to dumb that waaaaaaaaaaaaay down for Sheppy.....

To: TimF who wrote (919205)	2/6/2016 8:37:47 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573711

"They were considered part of the work force if they were working, or looking for work .Even when they were not part of the workforce (they didn't care to work, or were discouraged from looking for work), they effect the workforce participation rate, because they are counted in the population that the labor force is divided in to to get the work force participation rate." Read more: Participation Rate Definition \| Investopedia investopedia.com Follow us: Investopedia on Facebook A measure of the active portion of an economy's labor force. The participation rate refers to the number of people who are either employed or are actively looking for work. The number of people who are no longer actively searching for work would not be included in the participation rate. During an economic recession, many workers often get discouraged and stop looking for employment, as a result, the participation rate decreases. Consider a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued in November 2006, more than two years before Obama took office and before the start of the Great Recession. It pegged the start of the decline in participation rates at around 2000, and projected the decline would continue for the next four decades. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2006: Every year after 2000, the rate declined gradually, from 66.8 percent in 2001 to 66.0 percent in 2004 and 2005. According to the BLS projections, the overall participation rate will continue its gradual decrease each decade and reach 60.4 percent in 2050. Among the reasons cited for the trend: 1) The aging of baby boomers. A lower percentage of older Americans choose to work than those who are middle-aged. And so as baby boomers approach retirement age, it lowers the labor force participation rate. 2) A decline in working women. The labor force participation rate for men has been declining since the 1950s. But for a couple decades, a rapid rise in working women more than offset that dip. Women’s labor force participation exploded from nearly 34 percent in 1950 to its peak of 60 percent in 1999. But since then, women’s participation rate has been “displaying a pattern of slow decline.” 3) More young people are going to college. As BLS noted, “Because students are less likely to participate in the labor force, increases in school attendance at the secondary and college levels and, especially, increases in school attendance during the summer, significantly reduce the labor force participation rate of youths.” So no matter who was president, and independent of the health of the economy, BLS projected in 2006 that labor force participation rates were going to go down. But it’s also true that the decline has been even steeper than projected. For example, in that 2006 report, BLS projected the participation rate would decline to 64.5 percent in 2020. It’s already 1.7 percentage points below that in 2015. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office in February 2014, “[T]he unusually low rate of labor force participation in recent years is attributable to three principal factors: long-term trends, especially the aging of the population; temporary weakness in employment prospects and wages; and some longer-term factors attributable to the unusual aspects of the slow recovery of the labor market, including persistently low hiring rates.” CBO estimated that between the end of 2007 (a year before Obama took office) and the end of 2013, about half of the decline in participation rates could be pegged to long-term demographic trends, about a third to “temporary weakness in employment prospects and wages,” and about a sixth to “unusual aspects of the slow recovery.” factcheck.org

To: TimF who wrote (919205)	2/11/2016 3:48:43 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573711

This should be easier to understand for both of us.... The Real Jobless Rate Is 42 Percent? Donald Trump Has a Point, Sort Of @Neil_Irwin FEB. 10, 2016 Donald Trump seems quite certain that the real unemployment rate is higher than the 4.9 percent that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported it to be. A lot higher. “Don’t believe these phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment,” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night. “The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.” Mr. Trump might be bombastic, but he’s not entirely wrong. And the ways in which he is wrong are actually useful for anyone who wants to understand how to make sense of economic data. The truth is, there is no “true” unemployment rate. There are a nearly infinite multitude of ways to think about, and calculate, joblessness. The unemployment rate that is widely reported in the press on the first Friday of every month isn’t some manna from heaven, but rather a convention that has developed over the years that gives a partial — but still useful — view of the state of the labor market. Donald Trump said Tuesday night: “Don’t believe these phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.” Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The B.L.S. itself reports six different unemployment rates, of which the one the press most commonly cites is called U-3, the third of the six options. But anyone with Microsoft Excel and access to B.L.S. and census data could dream up their own version. So what’s in that 4.9 percent “official” unemployment rate? The numerator is Americans who are unemployed, the people who told a survey taker that they do not have a job but want one and have actively sought a job in the last four weeks. There were 7.8 million people in that category in January. The denominator is the total labor force, meaning people who either have a job or are looking for one; there were 158 million of those people. It’s easy to see how you can get to a much larger unemployment rate if you change your definition for either of those numbers. Take the B.L.S.’s broadest definition of unemployment for example, known as U-6. U-6 includes not just those 7.8 million people who have actively sought work in the last four weeks, but also millions more who told a survey taker that they wanted a job and had looked for one in the last year, including those who say they’re discouraged by economic conditions, along with people who are working part time but would prefer a full-time job. That measure of unemployment was 9.9 percent in January (or 10.5 percent if you want to cast aside the “seasonal adjustment” process that smooths out normal seasonal variation). But we don’t have to restrict ourselves to the calculations that B.L.S. has done for us. With a little creativity we can come up with other definitions of unemployment that yield an even higher number. There are, after all, many millions of Americans who are of prime working age who are not working, not looking for a job, haven’t looked for a job in the last year and yet in a healthier economy may well prefer to work. At the high point, in 1999, 84.6 percent of Americans 25 to 54 were working; now that is down to 81.1 percent. If we returned to the 1999 level, that would mean an additional 4.4 million working Americans. If we count those people — the missing workers — as unemployed, and tack them on to the definitions of unemployment included in U-6, we suddenly get to 20.1 million unemployed people and a 12.3 percent unemployment rate. But back to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the true unemployment rate is more like 28 or 35 or 42 percent. Is there any plausible way to come up with a jobless rate at those kinds of levels? As it happens, there is, and it’s right there near the top of the monthly jobless report. Only 59.6 percent of the United States population was employed in January. Take the inverse of that, and a whopping 40.4 percent of the population is not employed.If that is your definition of unemployed, well, yeah, the United States does have 40 percent unemployment. But keep in mind that this counts as unemployed every retiree, every college student, everyone who is unable to work because of a disability and every parent who voluntarily stays at home to raise a child. But surely we can find a way to make the unemployment rate seem higher still, right? I did some back-of-the-envelope math and came up with a way to get a jobless rate of about 53 percent! Instead of just including people 16 and above, the way the B.L.S. does, we could throw in those good-for-nothing children who are neither working, looking for work nor counted as part of the labor force. Like my 2-year-old niece, Lilia, who if you ask me has had it too easy for too long. I just hope the job she finds in the Trump administration involves finger-painting. Correction: February 10, 2016 An earlier version of this article misstated the population used to calculate a 40.4 percent jobless rate via the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It includes people 16 and older; it does not include children. nytimes.com