This Is Your Obama Recovery, July Edition

The latest BLS statistics are out.  The media are portraying this as a mild win for the Administration.

It’s not

The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% – which is about .3% higher than the peak “The One” promised before unleashing Porkulus.

But worse than that?  The Labor Force Participation Rate, which this past April was the lowest it’d been in thirty years (68.6%) before ticking up in May and June, dropped another tenth to 68.7%.  That’s a good chunk of the reason the unemployment rate held as steady as it did – people left the workforce.

What that means, if you remove the unemployment rate from the participation rate, is that 58.41% of the workforce is working.  That is…:

  • 2.16% (3.6 million people) worse than when Obama took office in January of 2009.
  • Two and a half points – 3.7 million or so – lower than George W. Bush’s worst record, and 5.3% lower than Bush’s peak (that’s over seven million jobs)
  • Almost a tenth of a power lower than when unemployment “peaked” at 10%, in October of 2009
  • 4.2% – thats 6.3 million jobs – lower than the nadir of the 9/11 Recession.

Put another way?  It’s been three years since more than 59% of the American people were working.

How long can economy sustain itself with less than three out of five people working?

11 thoughts on “This Is Your Obama Recovery, July Edition

  1. now if only the top 1% would “pay their fair share” (more than the current 40%) we could let the participation rate drop down to match Obama’s approval rating and things would be fine.

    DG where’s your homework?

  2. Math is hard. Obama is awesome!

    The stock market crashed in 1929 and insisted prosperity was right around the corner, which continued until 1932, when FDR finally admitted it was a depression.

    80 years later, history is repeating itself.

  3. Mitch, you’re actually being far too credulous about the real situation: the Obama’s administration has its thumb, no, it’s whole butt, on the scale of what the actual jobs numbers are. As the link indicates, these numbers are “adjusted” more than any in a decade, with the number showing a magical increase rather than the huge plunge the raw data show. I wonder why, is there anything coming up that the administration’s political masters might be concerned about?

  4. Joe, we’re still in a financial crisis. But don’t worry, Obama is doing his best to turn it into a Depression by following the Progressive policies Hoover implemented. (FDR’s administration admitted it copied the Hoover policies after being elected by calling Hoover too socialist, ironically.)

    Yeah, folks just don’t want to face reality and just make surface changes when you need big, painful structural changes. Just ask Steve Jobs what it’s like when you kick the can down the road on a big problem rather than facing short term pain — his refusal to face a scarey reality and endure the short term pain wound up killing him.

  5. Don’t worry. By election day, MSM will report the number to be under 7.0 based on a BLS glitch which failed to consider the hypothetical jobs the next round of quantitative easing will create.

  6. Obama is the worst president for working people in several generations. Jobs are hard to find and wages are flat, while prices for food, energy, and other essentials have increased dramatically.

  7. Don’t worry, Terry, your rich neighbors have plenty of food, gas and ammo. They’ll share with you if we can just disarm them and seize their assets. Problem solved. Hope and change wins. One day your neighbors will thank us for levelling the playing field.

  8. You are teh LIAR BergBrain…
    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/white-house-83-percent-unemployment-8254-percent/story?id=16922547

    Shocking thing is – this White House knows that 25-30% of the country (many of whom are Mitch’s neighbors) will try to retail the 8.254% in their circle of influence and claim the right wing media (is that the term Dog Gone?) is trying to make it look worse for the President in their undying attempts to get Romney, er, R-Money elected President.

  9. This is the Obama recovery. High unemployment, low economic growth. Forever.
    You don’t have to go deep into economics, classical or keyensian, before you learn that strong economic growth is good for everybody, rich and poor alike, while weak economic growth is bad for everybody, but bad for the poor most of all. Obama’s “redistribution over growth” has been devastating to unskilled and low skilled labor — except in places where the economy is thriving, like North Dakota.
    You think the economy is doing great? By all means, vote for Obama. Because this is what it will be like forever. There is no light at the end of the tunnel — unless we dip into another recession, which is very possible. Then it will get worse.

  10. Public Radio was absolutely giddy about the report. I mean things are looking up! It appears to them that the housing market finally hit bottom last winter (6 months after the summer of our recovery). More people are looking for work causing the rate to go up smells like a fresh breath of spring. They pointed to what they called an inexpicable statistic, consumer confidence is up. They could not explain why. Perhaps I can tell them. November is coming and there is a real chance we can vote the executive nightmare out of office.

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