patrick.net

Article fails to mention labor utilization rate.

Every Christmas unemployment drops to that compared to Bush's Presidency. It's the best gift Obama gets for Christmas, he can go home and sing "Home for the Holidays" on an upbeat.

No oh I can do better, one more then I gotta go...

7% unemployment is a cinch, Obama has done it 5 Christmas seasons in a row.

Hey Santa Baby how's about a full time, long-term, living wage job.

And all of this good news of course is likely to make conservatives unhappy. Oh no! Turns out the economy is doing better! Now they can't go around blaming Obama for a bad economy he didn't create anymore.

If the news can be simplified to "Enough people have a job, enough people have a house" the Fed will start tapering. Don't rich people want easy money off higher interest rates? Or are they too addicted to the higher numbers that come with all the sophisticated, PhD level, computer algorithm economics we're playing with these days? Some of them got burned badly, right?

edvard2 says

And all of this good news of course is likely to make conservatives unhappy. Oh no! Turns out the economy is doing better! Now they can't go around blaming Obama for a bad economy he didn't create anymore.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/06/more-americans-are-working-but-pay-is-still-low/

More Americans are working, but pay is still low

November's jobs report shows the U.S. created slightly more middle-wage jobs and a bit fewer low-wage gigs. But we're certainly not out of the woods yet.

FORTUNE -- The U.S. economy added jobs at a steady pace in November, helping push the unemployment rate to a five-year low, according to the government's monthly jobs report released Friday. More Americans are working, and the data suggests that the quality of jobs is improving, as more of the positions created are in industries that pay higher wages.

The unemployment rate fell to 7%, as employers added 203,000 jobs. That's slightly more than the 180,000 per month created over the previous six months. And more of those new positions are in middle-class jobs in construction and manufacturing than during the past year.

Low paying jobs aside, 23K jobs gained in one single month is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you consider our president got elected TWICE by default. Solely based on the fact that "Anything is better than this".

I'm thinking I'll buy a little something a little extra this Christmas, we're rolling high on hog. We gained 23 thousand jobs. Call up the Rasmussen Reports, check the numbers, has Obama's poll figures moved?

Damn! tough crowd, tough crowd...

Meaningless story without referencing the labor force participation rate. If everyone stopped looking for work because there were absolutely no jobs, the unemployment rate would be zero.

"lowest in five years"

so about as bad as the 1990s recession still:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CALOSA7URN

zzyzzx says

Article fails to mention labor utilization rate.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pFu

shows its recovering better than the Bush "Jobless" Recovery. About this point in the Bush Boom things were starting to fall apart again.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pFv

shows demographics are slowing down as the Baby Boom edges off into retirement age, if not retirement.

Unlike the Bush Economy, the current recovery is not totally dependent on home equity withdrawal and other FIRE shenanigans (the latter is more symptoms than drivers at this point) so I can't really see where things start falling apart for us now.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pFy

for all the QE going on, inflation isn't present, in gasoline prices at least.

Bellingham Bill says

Unlike the Bush Economy, the current recovery is not totally dependent on home equity withdrawal and other FIRE shenanigans (the latter is more symptoms than drivers at this point) so I can't really see where things start falling apart for us now.

Blurtman says

Meaningless story without referencing the labor force participation rate. If everyone stopped looking for work because there were absolutely no jobs, the unemployment rate would be zero.

unemployment ,considering exclusion of the long term unemployment, is much much higher ! the surveys are misleading. Plus the exclusion of hiring anyone unemployed after 6 months has made the "recovery" a jobless recovery... Bush years were actually better anyway one can cut it.

And the $64 Billion question for Obama, why arent the Long Term unemployed rehired ?

Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed
www.washingtonpost.com/.../companies-wont-even-look-at-resumes-of-t...‎
Apr 15, 2013 - Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed.

thomaswong.1986 says

And the $64 Billion question for Obama, why arent the Long Term unemployed rehired ?

Because it takes a long time to fix an economy the previous admin was at the helm of and screwed up royally.

edvard2 says

Because it takes a long time to fix an economy the previous admin was at the helm of and screwed up royally.

Interesting to know why long term are not being rehired... unlike the Bush years, LT unemployment is NOW epidemic.. If Bush can fix it during his administration, why cant Obama...

Read again... "This" is not going away !

Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed
www.washingtonpost.com/.../companies-wont-even-look-at-resumes-of-t...‎
Apr 15, 2013 - Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed.

Call it Crazy says

Ahhh.... The same old excuse for the drop in the LFPR is because of retiring baby boomers.... except the front edge of the baby boomers are just reaching retirement age, and as recent data shows, the over 50 age group has been the largest growing segment of newly employed.....

frankly when i first started in SV, the largest age group actively working were well past 40s and 50s.. and many are still working pushing well past 65.

fact is retirement is for corpses !!

Call it Crazy says

edvard2 says

Because it takes a long time to fix an economy the previous admin was at the helm of and screwed up royally.

Yeah, 5 years is still not enough time... Maybe we should make him dictator and check back in say 15 or 20 years to see how things are going...

Obama is still a Community Organizer after some great cause, he has no interest in working out any solutions with members of Congress outside of his office. Not even the Dems from Congress are included. There is no vision -- no plan -- no results to speak of... an empty 8 years !

http://www.youtube.com/embed/pB4b11_LREA

Call it Crazy says

Yeah, 5 years is still not enough time... Maybe we should make him dictator and check back in say 15 or 20 years to see how things are going...

I didn't even read your post. The cute lil' pictures got in the way.thomaswong.1986 says

Obama is still a Community Organizer after some great cause, he has no interest in working out any solutions with members of Congress outside of his office

Well its a good thing that personal opinions are often not attached to reality.

The article, like most articles in the popular press, is complete and utter bullshit. The Second Great Depression is still going strong with a real unemployment rate between 14.0% and 23.3%.

The government statistics are lies so outrageous that they insult the very intelligence of the U.S. population. The government ignores millions to tens of millions of people as "not being part of the workforce" simply because they ran out of unemployment benefits and have been out of work for years.

These are honest, hard-working Americans who want a job but cannot get them. So, of course, Uncle Sam calls them bums not looking to work. Uncle Sam is an asshole who adds insult to injury to the common American.

Kiplinger explains this deliberate fraud in unemployment numbers. Perhaps most telling is this graph.

That giant split is a whole section of America being left behind. People who have been unemployed so long that no one will want to hire them out of prejudice against the unemployed. These people are a part of the labor force, but have no chance of ever getting a job again, no matter how hard they try or work.

Yes, we're still in the Second Great Depression with unemployment hovering around 20%. Include underemployment, and our real GDP is probably about half of what it should be. That's a damn deep depression.

while I agree we're still in the recession, we have had 4 solid years of job-growth:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pGD

and we did it without borrowing $7T like last time:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pGE

Granted, we took $5T of new gov't debt:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pGG

but as the top 5% pays 60% of the income taxes:

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012

it's not quite as bad a debt for the middle class to take on.

As far as jobs-per-population goes, there's this:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pGI

jobs per age 15-64

confirms that there has been job growth.

Dan8267 says

That giant split is a whole section of America being left behind. People who have been unemployed so long that no one will want to hire them out of prejudice against the unemployed. These people are a part of the labor force, but have no chance of ever getting a job again, no matter how hard they try or work.

the same people complaining about gap between rich and poor are the ones

complaining about not able to find the right candidates for the jobs, because

they are unwilling to hire the long term unemployed. We certainly did not

discriminate against the so called LTU in prior decades recessions.

"http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pFv

shows demographics are slowing down as the Baby Boom edges off into retirement age, if not retirement."

No improvement is evident. At best, one can argue for a bottom.

Also consider the quality of new jobs. Normalize to that and things look worse.

And W. Bush was the worst president of all time, and a bona fide war criminal. But this must be Obama's show by now.

Nations underemployment is still all time high. Plenty of people are living paycheck to paycheck. Some are welfare losers, but most are just people who want to work and can't when opportunities are stolen from them by those sitting at the top.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/SP500

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WASCUR

Economy has in fact 'turned around', clown.

Tough to replace the Republican way of doing things:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CMDEBT

with effective policy, especially after the Republicans retook the House 4 years ago.

Not that Obama has any great ideas in how to fix things, he's kinda center-right in that regard.

What we need is Stiglitz policy, more or less, but Obama doesn't really go that near the left side of the policy debate, aside from speeches here and there.

200,000+ jobs created.
7% unemployment rate! lowest in years.
Stock market cheering all the way.
Looks pretty good to me.

I just bought rental property in phoenix. who wants to hear about it?

Strategist says

Looks pretty good to me.

In the past we've had rip-roaring recoveries:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pIl

ca. 1985 we had upwards of 4M new FTEs YOY, and the Clinton boom briefly touched that too.

The present recovery is just trying to claw back what we had going 5-10 years ago:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pIn

during the housing bubble boom.

We're still 5M jobs short, in the immortal words of Mr Wolf, "Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet."

Demographically, the baby boom is aging out of the workforce now (age 50 to 68 next year) so we don't need job growth per se any more:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=pIo

shows we're only about 50% of the way to the "full employment" of the late 1990s.

"Demographically, the baby boom is aging out of the workforce now (age 50 to 68 next year) so we don't need job growth per se any more:..."

It might seem intuitive that the participation rate for the older workers would have declined the fastest. But exactly the opposite has been the case. The chart below illustrates the growth of the LFPR for six age 50-plus cohorts since the turn of the century. I've divided them into five-year cohorts from ages 50 through 74 and an open-ended age 75 and older. The pattern is clear: The older the cohort, the greater the growth.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/Aging-Labor-Force.php

Tim Aurora says

FortWayne says

Plenty of people are living paycheck to paycheck

That is a cultural issue with America. People are living so much at the edge that with a little push they can fall into dire straits. Npt Obama's fault nor it is Bush's

They have no one to blame but themselves. I have seen a doctor couple with a negative net worth, and I have seen a garbage collector with his little home paid off. Makes you wonder which one is really smarter.