23 Million Unemployed Is Not a Recovering Economy!

23 Million Unemployed Is Not a Recovering Economy! by The Elephant's Child

October 7, 2012, 5:27 pm
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, Progressivism, Statism, Taxes | Tags: Household Survey, Increasing Unemployment, Labor Participation Rate

The labor participation rate is down to 1981 levels. Of the 114,000 new jobs last month, only 104,000 were in the private economy. The number that had a lot of people suspicious was the giant 873,000 leap in employment as measured by “the household survey.” That’s the biggest one-month increase in nearly 30 years, which does deserve an explanation.

The household survey contacts about 50,000 individual households to find out how many Americans are working. It is different from the much larger “establishment survey” which measures about 141,000 businesses and government agencies to see how many jobs they created. The household survey determines the jobless rate, so the huge one-month leap accounts for the September decline to 7.8%.

A lot of knowledgeable people were wondering if the Obama administration was, um, cooking the books. Robert Gibbs, former press secretary, appeared on the Sunday shows to say he was ‘shocked, shocked, that anyone would think that the administration manipulated the numbers. And yes, it is shocking that anyone would think that, but that is the kind of suspicion that this president’s lawlessness and executive orders and presidential proclamations have led us to.

Even if the 873,000 job estimate is confirmed in future months, the survey found that 582,000 of those jobs were what the survey calls “part-time for economic reasons — that is, held by people who want full-time work. Part-time is better than no work at all, but paying all the bills on a 20-hour-a-week job is no picnic.

Mr. Obama keeps repeating his refrain that the economy is recovering and has created 5 million new jobs, but that seems not to include the growth in the size of the  labor force. Real median household income is down $3,040 since the recession ended in June 2009. Mr. Obama promises more of the same policies, except that this time he says he’ll raise taxes immediately in 2013, and if Congress doesn’t act, they’re raising taxes too, by not extending the Bush tax cuts, and all the new taxes from ObamaCare kick in on January first.

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