Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
May 4, 2014
Did you know that there are nearly
102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now?
Image: American Unemployment (Wiki Commons).
And
20 percent of all families in the United States do not have
a single member
that is employed. So how in the world can the government claim that
the unemployment rate has “dropped” to “6.3 percent”? Well, it all
comes down to how you define who is “unemployed”. For example, last
month the government moved another
988,000 Americans into the “not in the labor force” category. According to the government, at this moment there are
9.75 million Americans that are “unemployed” and there are
92.02 million Americans
that are “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 101.77 million
working age Americans that do not have a job. Back in April 2000, only
5.48 million Americans were unemployed and only 69.27 million Americans
were “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 74.75 million
Americans without a job. That means that the number of working age
Americans without a job has risen by
27 million since the year 2000. Any way that you want to slice that, it is bad news.
Well, what about as a percentage of the population?
Has the percentage of working age Americans that have a job been increasing or decreasing?
As you can see from the chart posted below, the percentage of working
age Americans with a job has been in a long-term downward trend. As
the year 2000 began, we were sitting at 64.6 percent. By the time the
great financial crisis of 2008 struck, we were hovering around 63
percent. During the last recession, we fell dramatically to under 59
percent and we have stayed there ever since…
And
the numbers behind this chart also show that employment in America
did not increase last month.
In March, 58.9 percent of all working age Americans had a job.
In April, 58.9 percent of all working age Americans had a job.
Things are not getting worse (at least for the moment), but things are also definitely not getting better.
The month that Barack Obama entered the White House, we were in the
midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and only
60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.
Since only
58.9 percent
of all working age Americans have a job now, that means that the
employment situation in America is still significantly worse than it was
the day Barack Obama took office.
So don’t let anyone fool you with talk of an “employment recovery”.
It simply is not happening. The official unemployment rate bears so
little relation to economic reality at this point that it has
essentially become meaningless.
Look, how in the world can we have an “unemployment rate” of just “6.3 percent” when
20 percent of all American families do n0t have a single member that is working?
Here is how that 20 percent figure
was arrived at…
A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or
more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or
marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States
and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.
So if one out of every five families is completely unemployed, then
why is the official government unemployment rate not up at Great
Depression era levels?
Could it be that the government is manipulating the numbers to make them look much better than they actually are?
Why don’t they just go ahead and get it over with? They can just
define every American that is not working as “not in the labor force”
and then we can have “0.0 percent unemployment”. Then we can all have a
giant party and celebrate how wonderful the U.S. economy is.
And don’t be fooled by the “288,000 jobs” that were added to the U.S.
economy last month. For workers under the age of 55, the number of
jobs actually
dropped by a whopping 259,000.
If we were using honest numbers, the official unemployment rate would
look a lot scarier. John Williams of shadowstats.com has calculated
that the unemployment rate should be
about 23 percent. I don’t think that is too far off.
Meanwhile, the quality of the jobs in our economy continues to go down. The House Ways and Means Committee says
that seven out of every eight jobs
that have been “added” to the economy under Barack Obama have been
part-time jobs. But you can’t raise a family or plan a career around a
part-time job. To be honest, it is very hard for a single person to
even survive on a part-time wage in this economic environment.
As the quality of our jobs goes down, so do our incomes. The median household income
has declined for five years in a row, and the middle class is falling apart.
Without middle class incomes, you can’t have a middle class.
Considering what we have been watching happen, it should be no surprise
that the homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the
lowest level
in 19 years
or that the number of Americans receiving money from the government
each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector
by more than 60 million.
For many more statistics like this, please see my previous article entitled “
17 Facts To Show To Anyone That Believes That The U.S. Economy Is Just Fine“.
At a gut level, most Americans understand that things are much worse than they used to be.
The Pew Research Center recently asked people what “class” they consider themselves to be. The results were shocking.
Back in 2008, only 25 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “lower middle class” or “poor”.
Earlier this year, an astounding
40 percent of all Americans chose one of those designations.
We are in the midst of a long-term economic decline, and no amount of propaganda is going to change that.
But based on the “happy numbers” being trumpeted by the mainstream
media, the Federal Reserve is slowly bringing their quantitative easing
program to an end.
When quantitative easing is finally totally cut off, we shall see how
the financial markets and the U.S. economy perform without artificial
life support.
Personally, I don’t think that it is going to be pretty.
This article was posted: Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 8:08 am
