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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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 Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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Never one to let facts get in the way of a prejudicial rant, Techno claims:
| Quote: | | I guess Obama's fantastic job creation programs aren't doing such a bang up job after all. I thought that with millions of new jobs, increased consumer spending, the roaring stock market and the recession long gone, everyone would be doing rather well at this point, but maybe not. |
Malibu Golden Dawn chimes in with smoke and mirrors. Head in sand is more like it. Here are the numbers:
Jobs created during the tenure of George W. Bush 3 million
Payroll expansion 2.3%
Jobs created during the tenure of Bill Clinton 23.1 million
Payroll expansion 21.1%
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/01/09/bush-on-jobs-the-worst-track-record-on-record/
The same source does not report on the Obama administration, but a figure of 4.5 million jobs added, as of last fall, is generally accepted. This source--Forbes, hardly an apologetic liberal site, debunks the claims that falling unemployment is really people that quit the job market. Their conclusion:
| Quote: | “As this chart shows, the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment – including those on the fringe of the workforce – has remained pretty constant since 1994
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/09/05/obama-outperforms-reagan-on-jobs-growth-and-investing/
This source gives an even more stark comparison: http://ourfuture.org/20141208/bush-vs-obama-on-the-economy-in-3-simple-charts
Now to the question of statistics, and honest use of numbers. Clinton was more lucky than good. A president--true of all three--has far less to do with the economy than many believe. Clinton rode a lucky wave, and his significant mistake--signing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act--showed up to trash the end of Bush's presidency. It is not fair to blame Bush for the economic crash of the banking business--he had nothing to do with the policies that let it happen. But it is entirely fair to blame conventional Republican thinking--Republicans wrote the bill, it reflected their platform, and they provided most of the votes for passage.
So fairness says that we tag much of the job loss in the 2008 collapse to our rose-colored view of Clinton. Despite the early losses from that continuing job hemorhage, the Obama administration has seen a very substantial net gain of jobs. He should get credit for two programs that Bush could not have accomplished--TARP and the stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) saved all of our bacon. The ARRA as identified by PBS as creating 1.6 million jobs per year for four years: whttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/stimulus-bill-turns-5-years-old-still/
We can quibble about how expensive each job was, or the balance. The oil industry is eternally pissed that it worked particularly well, although slowly, on energy conservation and renewables--and has helped drive the cost of energy down, not up. Whatever quibbles others may have, I am not willing to let a Quixote-like quest for the perfect prevent the good.
Finally, although the causal link is not absolutely clear, the Affordable Care Act has both reduced the number of uninsured--and thus saved local governments big money--and stemmed the rapid cost increases in health care.
But don't let facts get in the way of prejudice. |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:29 pm Post subject: |
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Another way to look at it. Seems that we are at a low point even with all that job creation. From the government BLS.
Year Workforce Participation Rate, 16 years of age and over.
2000 67.3
2001 67.2
2002 66.5
2003 66.4
2004 66.1
2005 65.8
2006 66.0
2007 66.4
2008 66.2
2009 65.7
2010 64.8
2011 64.2
2012 63.7
2013 63.7
2014 63.0
2015 62.9
But don't let facts get in the way of prejudice. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:35 pm Post subject: |
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Good work Techno. My source was from 2009, here is the whole data set from 1994 on: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
There has been a slight decline in participation from the onset of the big recession in 2009 until present--about 3%.
But like many Obama haters, you choose among the many possible metrics to find one that satisfies your prejudices--ignoring the rest of the evidence, comments, and metrics. |
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pueno
Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807
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| Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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| techno900 wrote: | | How about the last 6.5 years? Any progress being made? |
Yes. Incredible progress from where Cheney/Bush left us 6.5 years ago.
But, because you're an O-hater, you can't admit that.
| techno900 wrote: | | I guess Obama's fantastic job creation programs aren't doing such a bang up job after all. I thought that with millions of new jobs, increased consumer spending, the roaring stock market and the recession long gone, everyone would be doing rather well at this point, but maybe not. |
Last year, and even more this year, I've been receiving phone calls from employers and headhunters asking for the names of our better engineering graduates and grad students. And these are companies like GE, General Dynamics, and many, many small-to-mid-sized eng'g and technical firms, including manufacturing companies.
They really are looking to hire young, new engineers.
This wasn't the case 8 years ago. Things have improved and are continuing to improve.
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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Are good jobs available to some? Without a doubt. But I though liberals were for those struggling at the bottom, but it seems as thought they have been cast aside. So why are the work force participation numbers dropping? If it's not Obama's leadership, then who is to blame?
2008 66.2
2009 65.7
2010 64.8
2011 64.2
2012 63.7
2013 63.7
2014 63.0
2015 62.9 |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 9:56 pm Post subject: |
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Why are work force participation numbers changing? Answer your own question. Two things to think about. First, it is a small change--might be noise. Second, are baby boomers aging and dropping out? Do the numbers reflect retirement age and early retirement?
Look for answers, not ways to blame Obama. |
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 11:33 pm Post subject: |
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| I think that mac's right. Baby boomer retirements are huge over a significant period of time. It's telling that the right uses baby boomer retirements in their criticisms of Social Security, but ignores them when considering force force participation numbers. |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180
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| Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 11:09 pm Post subject: |
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First......calling a 3.3% drop in the participation rate "a small change" is absurd...........it is very large, 5-6 million workers no longer looking for work. That's a lot of "noise". Second, labor participation in the 55 and over age group has been going up not down. It is younger workers dropping out of the workforce that are driving the lower participation rates. If labor participation had remained steady throughout President Obama's term, the unemployment rate would be around 10%.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2015 10:14 am Post subject: |
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Boy the propellor came right off the beanie! A comment that something might be noise--there are swings in the data and I don't know what causes them--becomes an "absurd claim."
Reading for content takes too long when your objective is finding a metric to hate Obama with. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2015 10:28 am Post subject: |
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Now this game would be a lot easier if you wing nuts posted your sources. Even better, if you thought about it critically and asked whether some debate on the subject has occurred. Not if it gets in the way of hating on Obama. Two clicks to get this from Fact Check:
| Quote: | Republicans have tried to temper the latest jobs report — which showed a gain of nearly 300,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dipping to 5.5 percent — by noting that the labor force participation rate has continued to decline. But in at least two instances, the claims have gone too far.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said the labor participation rate “is at an all-time low.” That’s not accurate. It was lower between 1948 and 1978.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blamed the shrinking participation rate on “the Obama economy,” but economists say most of the decline, which has been happening for more than a decade, is due to demographics, including the trend of baby boomers reaching retirement age and deciding to no longer work.
In a town hall speech in South Carolina on the day the jobs report was released, President Obama pointed to the job growth and declining unemployment rate as evidence that “we’re in much better shape now than we were six years ago.”
The same day, RNC Chairman Priebus issued a statement warning that the “unemployment rate masks the low labor force participation rate” and said that “in the Obama economy” the “percentage of Americans in the labor force has shrunk to levels not seen since the 1970s.”
Priebus, March 6: We also can’t forget that the unemployment rate masks the low labor force participation rate. Too many Americans have given up and stopped looking for work altogether. In fact, in the Obama economy the percentage of Americans in the labor force has shrunk to levels not seen since the 1970s.
That message was echoed by Sen. Graham two days later on NBC’s Meet the Press, when he said, “I think that the labor participation rate is at an all-time low.”
The labor force participation rate, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is “the percentage of the population [16 years and older] that is either employed or unemployed (that is, either working or actively seeking work).” Graham, who is considering running for president, is wrong about the rate being at an all-time low. However, as Priebus said, it is at its lowest point since the 1970s — 1978 to be exact.
The following graph from BLS shows the civilian labor force participation rate between 1948 and 2015. As the graph shows, the participation rate in February 2015 (62.8 percent) is the lowest since March 1978. But the rate was lower than that every month between 1948 and 1978.
The low point — according to historical data going back to 1948 — came in December 1954, when the rate was 58.1 percent.
As for Priebus tying the participation rate to the “Obama economy,” there’s more to that story as well. The labor force participation rate has been declining for more than a decade, and economists predict it will continue to decline for the next decade and more.
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.”
CBO, November 2014: Of the 3 percentage-point decline in participation between the end of 2007 and the end of 2013, CBO estimates, about 1½ percentage points was the result of long-term trends, about 1 percentage point arose from temporary weakness in employment prospects and wages, and about one-half of a percentage point was attributable to unusual aspects of the slow recovery.
Similar conclusions were reached by the Federal Reserve Board, which wrote in September 2014 that “much – but not all – of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 is structural in nature.”
A report from Shigeru Fujita at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia on Feb. 6, 2014, also sought to tease out the relative impact of various causes for the declining labor force participation rate. Fujita concluded that about 65 percent of the decline between 2000 and the final quarter of 2013 was due to retirement and an increase in disability.
Fujita, Feb. 6, 2014: The increase in nonparticipation due to retirement has occurred only after around 2010, while nonparticipation due to disability has been steadily increasing over the past 13 years. Similarly, nonparticipation due to schooling has been steadily increasing and has been another major contributor to the secular decline in the participation rate since 2000.
The number of those who did not look for a job (thus being out of the labor force) even though they wanted a job increased significantly between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the end of 2011. This group of “discouraged workers” explains roughly 30 percent of the total decline (around 2 percentage points) in the participation rate over the same period. Between the first quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013, the participation rate of this group has been roughly flat.
However, Fujita concluded, “Almost all of the decline (80 percent) in the participation rate since the first quarter of 2012 is accounted for by the increase in nonparticipation due to retirement. This implies that the decline in the unemployment rate since 2012 is not due to more discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force.”
Many economists believe that the steeply declining labor force participation rate is a reason for concern, as Priebus said, even as the declining unemployment rate seems to paint a rosier picture.
In a speech on Aug. 22, 2014, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen concluded that “the labor market has improved significantly over the past year,” but said that metrics, including 19 labor market indicators, suggest “that the decline in the unemployment rate over this period somewhat overstates the improvement in overall labor market conditions.”
Still, Priebus’ comment, tying the entirety of the drop in the labor force participation rate to “the Obama economy,” ignores some of the demographic and structural forces that have been driving the participation rate down for more than a decade, and that are expected to continue to drive the rate down for decades to come.
— Robert Farley
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http://www.factcheck.org/2015/03/declining-labor-participation-rates/
Three causes identified by the Washington Post here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/06/the-incredible-shrinking-labor-force-again/
A fair analysis would conclude that economy is perhaps weaker than the apparent unemployment numbers--it's been a long climb out of the collapse, and some of us understand the de-regulation fervor that caused the bubble. But picking one of 19 metrics and then screeching is just trolling. Here's another interesting tidbit from the second source:
| Quote: | Instead, the report notes, what's happening is that workers aren't entering the labor force at the same rates they used to. That's especially true for women, who are much less likely to enter the labor force today than they were in 2002 and 2003. Many are deciding to stay at home to raise the kids or enrolling in school instead.
That's not always a bad sign: The fraction of 16- to 24-year-olds pursuing an education has been growing over time, for instance. That could mean a more skilled workforce in future years (though it will also mean more young Americans with burdensome student debt). |
Pathetic on the critical thinking scale righties. High marks for Obama hatred. Why do you keep providing so much evidence about how deeply biased you are? |
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