2. The jobless rate actually makes the labor market look better than it actually is. The rate only counts people who want a job but don’t have one. But the labor force participation rate was 63.8% in June, just above near modern-era lows. (It was 66.2% in January 2008 and 67.3% in April 2000). Otherwise, unemployment would be around 11%.
And #4:
4. Chronic unemployment. The average length of unemployment rose to 39.9 weeks in June, close to recent peak. It was 17.4 weeks at the January 2008 peak and 23.9 weeks in June 2009, when the recession officially ended. Long-term joblessness is particularly bad because skills erode or become obsolete, leading to permanent losses in income.
And #9:
9. Entrepreneurial activity fading. The number of startup firms has crashed from pre-recession highs, still near levels previously seen in the early 1980s, when the number of establishments was far lower. Establishments less than a year old, including those belonging to the same firm, totaled 556,553 in 2010, according to the latest Commerce Department data. That’s down 26% from the peak of 747,278 in 2006. Meanwhile, the number of employees at startups has plunged, with a greater share of new firms with no employees — one-man shops. Very small startups are less likely to invest or to grow, a bad sign for future hiring.
But it’s worse than that. The number of people going onto federal disability payments is outpacing the number of new jobs being created.
Even as unemployment among college graduates remains stuck above the national average at 9.3 percent, a Reuters/Ipsos poll of four-year college graduates finds that President Barack Obama leads his Republican challenger Mitt Romney 52 percent to 27 percent.
The poll’s findings are especially surprising given reports last month that, for the first time in American history, unemployment for college graduates eclipsed that of high school graduates. As Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily reported, “Out of 9 million unemployed in April, 4.7 million had gone to college or graduated and 4.3 million had not, seasonally adjusted Labor Department data show.”
Still, some unemployed college graduates say they are sticking with Mr. Obama in 2012: “I was really excited when Obama won,” said Joe Zmudczynski, a 2011 graduate of Michigan’s Ferris State University who now lives at home with his parents. “He’s still my favorite. It’s not like you can snap your fingers and everything gets better.”
Returning to the nest with mom and dad after college and even into the thirties is becoming increasingly more common, but also less stigmatized. Young adults who live with their folks are cheerful, upbeat even, about their choice.
That’s the finding of a new Pew report, released Thursday morning. Three in 10 young adults (aged 25 to 34) say they’ve lived at home recently during the down economy, and 78 percent said they were satisfied doing so. Another 77 percent said they were optimistic about their future finances.
The number of young adults living in a multi-generational household — which can be any combination of grandparents, parents and adult children — saw a steep uptick during the recent recession, after being on the rise since 1980, said Kim Parker, the study’s lead author and a senior researcher with Pew’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Historically, such high rates of moving back home haven’t been seen since the late 1940s.
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
[…]Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
[…]The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor’s degrees who were “underemployed.”
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
The EPI is a left-wing think tank.
As if this were not bad enough, remember that the secular socialists have run the national debt up from 8 trillion to 16 trillion since taking over the House and Senate in January 2007. Labor union bailouts, green energy payoffs to Democrat fundraises, health care takeovers, and massive welfare spending, have to be paid back. Who is going to pay all of this back? Students with degrees in feminist studies and peace studies? And yet, incredibly, the government-run public school system and the universities have brainwashed these young fools into voting for their own dependence and enslavement. That’s what secularism and leftism offers young people: the road to serfdom.
By now, everyone has heard that Marxist Obama has failed to create jobs again, so that the underemployment rate is at 19.2%. (Underemployment is even higher than employment because it takes into account people working part-time who want to work full-time but can’t). That means that 20% of the population either cannot find work, or cannot find full-time work. The labor force participation under Obama’s socialist regime is now at a 26-year low.
Excerpt:
At 64.2%, the labor force participation rate (as a percentage of the total civilian noninstitutional population) is now at a fresh 26 year low, the lowest since March 1984, and is the only reason why the unemployment rate dropped to 9% (labor force declined from 153,690 to 153,186). Those not in the Labor Force has increased from 83.9 million to 86.2 million, or 2.2 million in one year! As for the numerator in the fraction, the number of unemployed, it has plunged from 15 million to 13.9 million in two months! The only reason for this is due to the increasing disenchantment of those who completely fall off the BLS rolls and no longer even try to look for a job. Lastly, we won’t even show what the labor force is as a percentage of total population. It is a vertical plunge.
Canada’s job creation in January was more than four times the median forecast, pushing the Canadian dollar to its strongest level since May 2008 and adding to evidence the country’s economic recovery may be accelerating.
Employment rose by 69,200 and the labor force increased by 106,400, Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa. The jobless rate rose to 7.8 percent from December’s 7.6 percent, as more people sought work. Economists forecast 7.6 percent unemployment and job growth of 15,000, according to the median estimates of 25 and 26 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
“This adds confidence to the notion we are headed for a better year for growth and growth in the job market,” said Mark Chandler, head of Canadian currency and rates strategy at Royal Bank of Canada’s RBC Capital Markets unit in Toronto. “There isn’t a lot of slack in the labor market in Canada, certainly on a relative basis to other countries.”
Canadian policy makers have been dealing with the impact of a strong currency and a slowdown in growth of household and government spending that crimped the economic recovery in the second half of last year. Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney stopped raising interest rates after September and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty scaled back plans to exit stimulus.
“It’s one of these reports that’s strong through and through – it’s hard to find any weakness,” said David Tulk, chief Canada macro strategist at Toronto-Dominion Bank’s TD Securities unit.
“The Bank of Canada would likely just see this as a step towards a stronger recovery, but not a point where they would need to respond,” he said. He predicts a July rate increase.
[…]The report restores Canada’s status as having regained all the jobs lost in the recession, after a Jan. 28 revision based on updated census data reduced Statistics Canada’s estimate of total employment.
The Canadian dollar gained 0.4 percent to 98.75 cents per U.S. dollar at 4:30 p.m. in New York from 99.11 cents yesterday, after earlier touching 98.32 cents, the strongest level since May 2008. The benchmark 10-year Canadian government bond yield increased four basis points to 3.46 percent, the highest since May.
[…]“Too many Canadians are still looking for work, the economic recovery is fragile,” Flaherty said today in response to a question in the House of Commons. “We need to continue with our job-creating, low-tax plan.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said reductions in corporate taxes are the best way to boost employment.
[…]Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, said Jan. 26 it will open 40 “supercenters” in Canada by the end of January 2012, creating 9,200 construction and store jobs.
Basically, the Canadians listened to Obama’s speeches, and then decided to do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what he said. They are drilling for more oil, lowering corporate taxes below 20%, (ours is 36%), cutting spending and raising interest rates to encourage people to spend less and invest more, which supports job creation. This is what Hayek would recommend. In order to create jobs, you need to cut corporate taxes to provide businesses with a profit motive. And you need to make sure that there is capital to borrow for risk-taking, which happens when interest rates are higher because people save more money by giving it to banks to lend to businesses. When a business sees that it can keep profits that it makes then that’s what they’ll do. That’s when they start expanding their businesses and taking risks – when there is money to be made. If you keep banning drilling, imposing health care costs and demonizing businesses in speeches, like Obama does, then they WON’T hire anyone.
I hope that all the young people who voted for the first MTV President are happy with their 18% youth unemployment rate. Ideas have consequences.
But the differences between Canada are even more pronounced. Recall that Canada is ONE TENTH the size of the United States, with one-tenth the population, one-tenth the GDP, and one-twentieth the national debt. A 700,000 increase in the number of jobs is really like a 700,000 increase when projected proportionally to the United States. Canada didn’t spend massive amounts of money on “stimulus” spending, because the prime minister is NOT a Keynesian. He’s a Hayekian, like me. He’s not following the socialist, academic playbook – he’s following the capitalist, real-world playbook. He doesn’t believe that lowering interest rates and wasting money of government public works projects is a way out of a recession. And he’s right.
WINTERY KNIGHT 