patrick.net

Obama is to blame for not fixing everyone's problems on his first day in office. Even if those problems were decades in the making and the zealot Bush poured jet fuel on a blaze.

Obozo!!

It seems the Democrats inherited a Perfect Problem.

They don't have to do fuck all, and if anyone bitches or moans about this administration, all's they's got's to do, is just merely mention the last administration.

It's their "get out of intelligent conversation free" card.

Obama is to blame for not fixing everyone's problems on his first day in office. Even if those problems were decades in the making and the zealot Bush poured jet fuel on a blaze.

Obozo!!

TL;DR

Bush's fault?

From the linked rt story:

"The data points to the aging baby boom generation – those born in the post-war years between 1946 and 1964, as a primary reason for the significant drop."

No shit!

shows the flood of the baby boom (age 51-69 now) hitting Medicare age this decade and next.

and

"Republican House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) used the jobs report as an opportunity to criticize the Obama administration and the lackluster economic results."

It's all bullshit, all the way down now. Clearly Obama's to blame for the birthrate being boosted to +4M per year in the postwar 10 years before he was born, and for Reagan's legalizing all the mexicans here when Obama was a radical organizer in Chicago, said illegals now also hitting retirement age.

Oilwelldoctor says

Demise started a long time ago

"Demise" is part of the conservative propaganda. This nation has serious issues we need to address, but we have an unserious political dialogue between progressives and conservatives exacerbating everything.

It's pretty much always been this way, conservatives eventually lose one battle (universal male suffrage, slavery, federal precedence over states, trust-busting, immigration, the income tax, the central bank aka "Fed", womens suffrage, teaching evolution in schools, the gold standard, segregation, birth control, mixed-race marriage, abortion, gay rights . . .) and then pick the next stupid hill to die on.

Truly a bizarre mindset yet they're 40% of the population on a good day, and they show up and vote more than anyone (80%)!

90% of them "trust" Fox News, which says a lot.

Part of the conservative mindset is that everything is always falling apart. Bullshit!

sbh says

and show the graphs of that administration fist fucking every economic and budgetary index the entire time it drove the nation off the cliff

This is the first graph I made on FRED that really blew me away:

It tells the story of the booming 1960s, 'stagflationary' 1970s, then the Reagan Lift of the 1980s, then the Clinton consolidation, then how we got the Bush Boom last decade.

Also how we've been treading water since 2010.

Funny thing is not 1 person in 1000 is familiar with this basic element of economic reality.

Another quote from the article:

"To put it another way, when President Obama took office in January 2009, there were 80,529,000 Americans who were not participating in the workforce, which means that 12,369,000 US citizens have left the workforce since then."

There were 47M people age 62+ in 2009, now there's 57.5M, an increase of 10.5M. Not everyone age 62 was working in 2009, but that's the big driver of the trend.

It is true that the Great Recession kicked many workers in the nuts, but that's not Obama's fault, and if it were up to the GOP we'd be in year 7 of another Great Depression, just like they blew up the country in the 1920s and fought every effort by progressives to fix things in the 1930s.

shows how government employment has been suppressed under the GOP control of the House and thus Congress.

There's a million missing jobs right there. Talk about "job killers"!

Call it Crazy says

So, 6 years later, who's fault is it now for the participation rate?

Shows how things have stopped getting worse for the core labor market.

As for dynamics driving or not driving this, we would need to look at:

Real gov't spending .. note that this rose 50% during Bush's two terms, and has fallen $200B/yr since the GOP took over the House in 2010.

Well played, GOP, squeeze the neck of gov't and then blame the black guy!

but the Libbies have been sitting in the Big chair the last 6.

Read your Constitution some day, plz, specifically Article I Section 7

http://www.annenbergclassroom.org/page/article-i-section-7

What the fuck is your fixation with the +62 age group that isn't working???

That's what's driving the falling participation rate ("Working Age 16+" means just that, 16 to 115, but nobody knows that since everybody assumes working age stops at 65 or whatever)

main payers of your socialist utopia in the 24 to 54 age bracket

Which by the above graph is steady, not falling at all.

To get back to Clinton heights we're going to need to reverse a lot of mistakes we've made the past 10+ years, e.g.:

is a evidence of an immense asymmetry between corporate america (and "the 1%" who own 40%+ of it) vs. the middle-class paycheck economy.

If half that after-tax profit -- ONE TRILLION DOLLARS -- were either paid as wages or tax revenues, we'd have a much more solid economy now.

I fail to see how a conservative could disagree with this : )

American news reports 5.5% U.S. unemployment. Foreign news reports 33% U.S. unemployment.
mmm.....

The failing here, is not working towards a 20 HOUR WORK WEEK!

Productivity is high, we should all be reaping the benefits of that.

However under capitalism they'd rather whip as few strong young bucks as possible. Lower overhead.

It's all Obama's fault!!!

Oilwelldoctor says

33% of Americans out of workforce, highest rate since 1978

Baby boomers drove the numbers way up when they going into working age, the baby boomers kept the numbers up when they were all working age, now it's baby boomers driving the numbers way down as they are retiring/dying.

Too bad CIC can't comprehend demographics. The baby boomers are retiring in large numbers is the biggest part of lowering the participation rate. The leading edge boomers are almost 70 and the big bulge is between 60-65 so it's going to continue. Even the original article said so. Here's a much better analysis. http://qz.com/286213/the-chart-obama-haters-love-most-and-the-truth-behind-it/ Not that CIC will read it or be able to understand it. A better way to see this is to look at the working age population rather than total. The participation rate only drops from 66% to 64% 2008-2014 for working age.

The one thing everyone missed totally is the rise of the 2 earner households in the 70's and 80's driving the participation rate up. Boomers are retiring in couples driving it down just as fast.

Call it Crazy says

So, let's zoom in for a closer look at that graph:

*



*

Looks a bit different.... After the recession hit in the beginning of his first term, the previous GOP President was able to not only stop the drop, but increased the participation rate. The current Dem President, at the same point in his second term, not so much..

The greatest real estate/credit boom in history along with 2 wars fought on credit and the participation rate went up a whole 1% bottom to peak. That's impressive. Not very. Bush actually probably did worse by this metric. Not that Obama doesn't suck.

* the participation rate of 55+ is 40%. If that demographic increase due to sheer size, it brings down the overall #. duh.

* the participation rate of 25-54 is already stabilized. 83% to 81% is not a huge dropoff and that trend already stopped. 81% participation rate is frankly as high as any in the world.

* 20-24 year old are staying in school longer.

The scary open question is what might happen if a third President Bush takes office in 2017.

finehoe says

what might happen if a third President Bush takes office in 2017.

Jeb would be a much better president that Obama (or Bush#2).

bob2356 says

The one thing everyone missed totally is the rise of the 2 earner households in the 70's and 80's driving the participation rate up. Boomers are retiring in couples driving it down just as fast.

What if instead of a crisis of capitalism, this is a just another adjustment? More stay at homes perhaps?

Usually the SIGNPOSTS LEADING TO APOCALYPSE are a big disappointment.

zzyzzx says

Jeb would be a much better president that Obama (or Bush#2).

Jeb Bush is rigid, unwavering even when presented with facts, and will force facts to fit his own predetermined outcomes. This isn't speculation: it's history.

Wait a minute. American aged 16 and older not participating in the labor market? Not participating? You interpret to mean that there is less job out there or bad economy? My kids and my friend's kids are not looking for a job. After i read you guys' comments, I am confused. I need to go check my eyes. No matter how many times I read, it looks like 16 to me. This is a classic omission of information to mislead the readers into thinking something more sinister is going on. Before making a judgement, do your own diligence.

Think no matter how you slice it, the America and the lifestyle afforded I knew as a kid in the 60's is gone. On my street in small town America, all the men were employed and if by chance, one wasn't there was lots of embarrassment and gossip. Women stayed at home to mind the kids (yes, how sexist!).

I suppose improvements in lifestyle are partially to blame, automation, slave labor from abroad, the internet revolution, etc. Perhaps just a natural progression.

But what to do with the excess people displaced in our modern world?

sbh says

It begs the question whether we should even listen to idiot racists who think any president is responsible for 40 year demographic trends, and the aging of population cohorts.

This is highly offensive.

It should read "It leads to the question whether we should even listen to idiot racists who think ..." - the rest of the sentence is correct as-is.

"Begs the question" means someone actually asked the question, and that the answer given has failed to address the question.

Oilwelldoctor says

But what to do with the excess people displaced in our modern world?

This is a difficult question. We just can't have a leisure welfare state since after 30-40 years of that we'd have way too many mouths to feed for free.

The key fix I see is to keep much more of what people spend on their personal consumption going to the actual service providers, instead of the trillions each year leaking out to China, landlords, and corporations. All that money is leaving the paycheck economy and not coming back into it as wages.

The main reason we have two-income households is that it in the 1970-80s we had an "arms race" where married working couples could buy a better house than just one income, so now it takes two incomes to be the top bidder.
Over time though this just reset the base price valuation of housing, since due to supply limitations the price is set at what the top bidder is able to borrow from the bank.

Housing and healthcare each are a two trillion per year industries but very little of that is actual 'consumption'

shows what's been going on. Blue and red are housing and health care expenditures, green is food.

Now food, we consume. You buy a steak at the store for $10, there was a long line of workers necessary to get that to you, each taking their cut of that $10. And when you leave the store, the steak is no longer there.

You pay $2,000 per month for an apartment though, and that same dynamic is no longer present. Most of that money is instantly bled off into the rent-seeking economy.

The apartment would have been there whether or not the renter paid the rent that month; the renter is really buying the right to keep the #2 bidder from taking over his lease.

I.e. other than wear and tear, there's no actual consumption going on!

Same thing with a $1,000 hospital visit. Relatively few high-skilled rent-seekers protected by guildism, taking their rents.

We could have a sustainable middle class economy again if we fixed these three things: our $500B/yr trade deficit, and the $2T/yr expenses in housing and healthcare.

Then we could move to a 20hr workweek, so people have a bit more leisure and the freedom to work part time jobs.

Never going to happen though. Corporate America has us by the balls, and ~40% of the electorate we call conservatives is boosting for more capture of our economy by the "job creators"

sbh says

HEY NIGGER, FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're confused again. HydroCabron isn't a nigro, he's a pendejo. Get your terminology straight.

sbh says

Methinks you miss the dynamic at work here.

yeah i was trying to figure out who was calling whom a nigro.

It's interesting to observe how even on forums, certain cliques form. Kind of an us against them dynamic.