For eight years conservatives and many on Fox News used the Labor Force Participation Rate to look at unemployment. Now they have stopped and are looking at it in a more traditional way. I wonder why. As a service to those who got used the Labor Force Participation Rate I present the following information: The current LFPR is 62.8% which means that 37.2% of people eligible to work are not employed; this rate has held essentially steady since 2014 The more traditional way measure unemployment shows it has dropped from 4.1 % to 3.9%. https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/week-trumponomics-workers-disappear-173826715.html
I am very disappointed the labor participation rate has not gone up. The labor participation rate for the over 55 crowd has tended to go up, while the under 55 crowd has tended to go down. The number of people applying for unemployment insurance has gone down. It appears that a very large part of our population is content to live on disability and other government supported programs or possibly living with relatives or friends.. This is a bad sign for our population. I am having difficulty correlating all this.
You mean like this report released by the WH 5 hours ago? https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles...labor-force-participation-prime-aged-workers/
So now you are going to use a different number? LOL. One that shows flat after 2012 and even a sharp rise under Obama? LOL.
I wonder what happens with the 27 MILLION legal and illegal immigrants in our workforce, when their jobs become available to the 95 MILLION citizens or so out of the labor force. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.nr0.htm I strongly suspect the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be going through some major changes in the future. They are still using surveys based upon the 1940s when men worked and MOST women stayed home. Steve
This is an even more misleading picture of the Labor Force Participation Rate because it omits people 18 to 25 and people over 54 years of age which were counted in the original formula that I spoke about.
You mean like this one? The peak was in the 1990s when NAFTA and other trade agreements occurred. Jobs left the country.
My question is why have conservatives abandoned this measurement to use more traditional measurements. I did not mean to infer that it no longer existed only that it became the favored measurement use by conservative sources before 2016, but is no longer.
I didn't know "conservatives" abandoned anything, but Vman shows a chart posted on the White House website. What do you think is going to happen with the 27 MILLION legal and illegal immigrants in our workforce, when their jobs become available to the 95 MILLION citizens or so out of the labor force? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.nr0.htm Steve
The US requires a Labor Force Participation Rate of 66% to 67% in order to have any hope of properly funding certain programs like Medicare and Social Security. The Social Security Administration has had to remove money from the OASI Trust Fund every year for the last 10 years, because not enough workers are paying into the program to maintain solvency. The Social Security Trustees have failed to meet any of their revenue projections for the last 10 years. For example, Table IV.A1.—Operations of the OASI Trust Fund, Calendar Years 2012-2026 the projected income from the FICA payroll tax for all three scenarios was: $725.5 Billion Low Cost $719.8 Billion Intermediate Cost $713.8 Billion High Cost The actual revenues were $709.3 Billion. Under the Intermediate Cost assumptions for 2018, the Trustees projected $751 Billion in revenues, and there's just no way that will happen. 1st Quarter revenues are only 1.8% higher than 2017 1st Quarter revenues. There's just no way revenues are going to increase 6% this year. The projections by the Trustees are based on a Labor Force Participation Rate of 66%-67%. Even though the difference is only 4%-5% from the current rate, it represents a large number of workers who are not working. That's because 268,000 people dropped out of the Labor Force in April. It could represent the Millions of jobs that were permanently lost, and will not be replaced any time soon.
I think the effect is part of a decline in what us older people know as self-respect; the thing that you can only earn from yourself, and the thing that gives you power over your own life. We have an increasing share of the public willing to give that power to government.... ALA, dependency. Diminishing strength of character.
