2016: Obama's America (no, not the stupid movie)

Politics & Elections
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No thread on the latest job report? I’m rather surprised. No worries. I’m (not from the government and) here to help.

-7.7% unemployment
-146K jobs added (this will almost certainly be revised downward)
-554K(!) people dropped out of labor force.
-September jobs added revised downward from 148K to 132K; October also revised downward from 171K to 138K.
-Household survey shows a net loss of 122K jobs (important for those crowing about the massive jobs gains in September)

Surely, JSLE will be here shortly to tell me how everything is humming along nicely (it’s not) or how awesome a month September was (it’s turning out to be that it wasn’t) or how I was wrong or whatever.

…And btw, while I realize this is late, as we can all see I made Ravenman a counter bet which he ignored, so he can’t accuse me of whatever he’s trying to accuse me of.

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Your basis for this is?

By the way, I noticed that upthread you predicted that hiring last month would turn out to be weaker than in November 2011. There were 120,000 jobs added in November 2011, so you were wrong.

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1.) That should be 350K, not 554K. Not sure where I got that number from.

2.) The number of part time workers went up more than I anticipated. Hardly some earth shattering, deal breaker.

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The survey which these numbers are based on was taken right after Hurricane Sandy, so the numbers may be off. I’ve heard they may be significantly revised later.

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And the first number I gave was about right. The number of people not in the labor force rose 542K.

The BLS said on their report that the hurricane had minimal to no effect on employment numbers.

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I guess OMG’s point is that job growth continues to not be amazing. I’m not sure who he’s arguing with, but I don’t see another way to read it.

Hopefully we’ll get more growth. I think Obama’s policies will lead to more growth than the Republicans’ policies.

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I’ll join the chorus asking OMG to provide better cites in future. Just now the Google News headline is “Wall Street Journal: Economy Adds 146,000 Jobs”. AFAIK, Wall Street Journal is still part of the Fair and Balanced:trade_mark: network and has not yet been co-opted by the crypto-Kenyan Comedy Network News conspiracy.

I lived in California in the 1990’s and bank tellers were being cut to part-time status to avoid paying benefits. If employers would do this to bank tellers, I see little reason for optimism for dishwashers and busboys.

Sooner or later it will be clear that health-care should be government-paid not employer-paid. But by that time, it will be forgotten that it was GOP intransigence, not progressivist intent that led to employer mandates.

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Is there a “no true unemployed Scotsman” fallacy?

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“I’m from the government and here to help” was what everybody in New York and New Jersey was *demanding *to hear after Sandy. That’s the problem with silly sound bites. In the real world they come bite to bite you. Everybody in government (and I worked for government for a decade) knows that all the people in their district across the spectrum from right to left wants government spending to be cut FOR OTHER PEOPLE. They want, love, and loudly insist upon spending that benefits them. That’s why Newt Gingrich, IIRC, brought in more government spending into his district than anyone else in the House.

Sandy won’t be a factor in the 2016 election (except peripherally if it gives Cuomo and Christie some extra traction to make bids that I think they’re gong to make anyway). That’s the problem with trying to take the weekly news and elevate it to long-term meaning. And you make it worse when you try to give it meaning with sound bites, cherrypicked facts, and bogeyman scare tactics that can be so easily refuted.

China is currently hitting the economic wall that every economist except those using “CHINA!” as a bogeyman predicted. Kevin Yao of Reuters wrote:

If Reuters is too neutral a source, here’s a column from the Wall Street Journal, China’s Economic Dead End.

China’s GDP will certainly surpass us: they have four times the population and need just a small overall increase to make that happen. But as this map shows, GDP per capita is only about one fourth of ours. The average Chinese worker is much worse off than our average worker. That will take generations to change.

I have a graphic response to the silliness about asshole CEOs trying to blackmail the public by crying wolf over Obamacare. I love Google Images. This one is from Brandindex.com. Some text to go with it.

The rebound is due to the public apology Metz issued. That illustrates the hole you dig when you comment on one day’s news without waiting for the next week’s response. It’s a silly game and neither side should play it.

That means I’m not going to get into the job numbers you posted. They’re a so what. As I said repeatedly during the election, never use one poll. Similarly, for the economy, never use one set of numbers. Either use the totality of the dozens of measures or, better, use all the trend lines for the dozens of measures. And as I’m sure you know but are ignoring when you cherrypick, the trend lines are generally up across the board.

You’ve already been spanked by trying to claim that seasonally adjusted figures didn’t already have the seasonal adjustment baked into them. That’s such a huge conceptual mistake that it calls any other economic claims you make into question.

Unfortunately, they don’t need additional help. They’re sufficiently questionable all on their own.

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[citation needed]

Of course, that’s a non-serious request to an asinine assertion. I mean, I would love to know how you would substantiate such a claim. Because of Newt Gingrich? I don’t live in Newt Gingrich’s district. I’d go so far as to say that 99% of conservatives/libertarians in the U.S. don’t live on his district, either. Your extrapolation simply doesn’t make any sense and fails the rational test, since there are millions of people who actually vote for budget/funding cuts in their own districts in exchange for a bit of fiscal sanity.

Number one, I don’t recall mentioning Sandy anywhere. Indeed, you’ve been the only one to bring that up (oh, you are apparently unfamiliar with the nine most dangerous words in the English language). So I suppose that makes you guilty of whatever it is you were trying to accuse me of, now doesn’t it? Number two, as we’ll get to in a bit, you’re the only one cherry picking data and ignoring those things which don’t suit you, but why should that surprise me?

This has to be the worst dodge ever. WTF does GDP pet capita have to do with anything? Qatar has approximately twice the GDP per capita of the U.S., but so what? No one thinks Qatar is the next economic superpower because they have a high GDP per capita precisely because their total GDP is a fraction of the U.S.’ total GDP. The U.S. has so much because our economy makes up a significant portion of the world’s economy. By 2016, China will surpass the U.S. economy and will gain far more economic leverage than it has now. That’s not some boogeyman; that’s a cold hard fact. But don’t my word for it; the OECD recently released a report stating a much.

I’m left to wonder where you have been the past for years? China has become more brazen with their economic policy, even reaching the point where they can “bully” not only their neighbors and Europe, but the U.S. as well, due to them being our largest creditors. Here is an article from NPR detailing China’s growing economic leverage over the U.S. growing. Here is another article from NPR detailing how China has overtaken the U.S. to behind the world’s largest using partner. Given the source, you can’t scream about how biased it is. So, please, put your had back on the sand. It suits you well. Just because you wish diverging were a boogeyman doesn’t make out so.

The above quoted has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with job loses directly attributable to Obamacare.What say you about this? Or this? Or even this? Or any other such news story, of which there are many? Of course, you will hand wave any and all future job loses away directly attributable to Obamacare, much like you hand wave the last four years away, but that does not make said loses any less of a reality.

Right. This is nothing more than willful ignorance. Never mind the posts on this board trumpeting that “awesome” jobs report from September (those people are now conspicuously quiet), you do realize the BLS has readily accessible time series data, correct? We can look at the two most meaningful measures of the health of the economy and look at the trend.

The employment-to-population ratio? Flat.

(BTW> Krugman loves the EP ratio and notes the same thing.)

The participation rate?. Negative trend.

Three years after the recession officially ended and we’re actually worse off than we were then. A lower percentage of the working age population have jobs now than at any point of the recession. Manufacturing is still hemorrhaging jobs and the majority of new jobs being added are low wage, lown skill jobs (like food services). You can’t spin that away. Your “positive trends” simply aren’t. Unemployment is down for one reason and one reason only. In any given month, two to four times as many people drop out of the labor force as find a job. If Pepe stored giving up looking for work, the U3 would be over 11%.

But go ahead; wish those facts away. I know you want to.

Actually, what I said-- just for the sake of posterity-- is that October, November and December hiring numbers tend to always be higher than the two months or so preceding them, and that it wouldn’t be smarty for me to bet that the job numbers on those months would be higher than the few previous ones. But it’s not my fault of people can’t understand that.

If that’s the case, I eagerly await your response.

Yup.

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If anyone can answer, I’ll appreciate it: Isn’t the number of people leaving the workforce being driven by baby boomers retiring? Not entirely, mind, just pumped up.

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Also, my phone apparently hates me linking. Guess I won’t do that on my phone anymore.

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Weeelll, in response let me ramble on for a bit.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I’m finding it oddly hard to pin that quote down. No doubt that Reagan said in a speech - it’s on YouTube, but I can’t find the rest of the speech or the setting in a quick search. It’s making me curious.

Anyway, as I said, I was in government for what happened to be the entirety of the Reagan years. The Southern strategy, which I reminded you about in this thread was followed by an equally deliberate strategy of cutting federal money to urban areas and moving the spending to the areas that would benefit the growing Republican majorities. You might argue that this was justified because the Sun Belt was growing in population while the Rust Belt was declining, but removing money from populations who needed assistance precisely because their world is collapsing around them is a political philosophy and a choice to make. It was a successful move in the short run just as the Southern strategy was, certainly.

While we’re looking at history and the Reagan years, I can’t help but remember that JAPAN! was being used as the same bogeyman that CHINA! is today. Japan was the world’s economic force, it was going to overtake us, it made real stuff, it had a culture we wanted, it was buying up all our goodies, it was going to drink our milkshake and eat our lunch and probably something about a midnight snack thrown in.

You don’t hear much about JAPAN! today. Two decades of austerity policies will do that to a country. And yet Japan today owns 1,117 billion of our debt, or 6.9% of the total. China? It owns 1,149 billion or 7.1% of the total. Figures are from the most recent good article I could find, in the Guardian.

Should we worry about those numbers? Instead of cherrypicking and presenting them without context, why not read the article?

If so you’d find that China $1,149 billion figure is:

Japan’s, however, is up 26%. Are we going to get into another round of JAPAN IS OWNING US? Of course not. Some of us learned from the last go-round.

It also helps to put foreign owned debt into context. It is $5,385 billion or about 33% of the total 16,066 billion. The other two-thirds is owned by us and owed to us.

China’s growth is real and amazing. But. No nation goes along forever at 10%+ growth rates. China’s fiscal cliff is realer, steeper, deadlier, and nearer than the phony one that is facing us. China will continue to grow economically, of course. It will surpass us in total GDP. It is becoming a superpower. But my forecast for its future - an opinion, just as yours is - is wildly different from your shouts of CHINA! China is going to have enormous internal growing pains over the next decade, some so severe that the Middle East uprisings will be forgotten. It is not going to overtake us economically in any likely form.

My forecasts for growth in the U.S. in the next four years - an opinion, just as yours is - is for more of the same we’re having now. Slow, bumpy, but regular job growth, a much improved and maybe fully recovered housing market, a rising stock market, and improved consumer spending and confidence. In short, exactly what I’ve been predicting for the past couple of years and exactly what we are seeing.

I really don’t care what this month’s job report says, or last month’s, or next month’s. I tell people on all sides that only the long-term trends count. You know what? They’re going to discuss them anyway despite what I said. Just as I said over and over that no one poll or one result mattered and nobody listened. People. Whaddya gonna do?

I’m not an optimist by nature. My general philosophy is that people are idiots. But I believe in numbers and basic arithmetic. They are all positive domestically, so that’s where I have to go. Following the numbers has given me a good track record, which you can easily look up. Your track record is… not as good. Past performance is no guarantee of future blah blah blah. Shrug. (We need a shrugging smiley.) We can keep going at it for the next four years and see who has the better score. I bet it’s me.

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My personal prediction? Meh. It won’t be that different from today. The internet will be even more of a big deal, even more people will have smartphones, the Wii U will be the winner of the next console generation but still will have semi-miminal support, China will be struggling as more companies move out of it thanks to automation improving and oil continuing to get more expensive, we’ll have another year of nasty storms in the interim…

Ultracapacitors will be in a lot more products than they are today. We will have more solar and wind power, and will probably be eying building more nuclear power more seriously than we are today.

The ice caps will be melting even faster than projections, further alarming scientists, but people still will refuse to do anything about emissions because China won’t switch off the coal plants, especially with their economy sputtering.

There will be more atrocities in Africa.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we have gotten into a conflict with either Iran or North Korea in the interim, but I wouldn’t rely on it. Still wouldn’t surprise me.

And I suspect Syria’s government will have fallen, but the country will be a mess nonetheless.

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Just as a point of interest, 66 years ago in 1946, the US population grew by 7,573,000, or by approximately 630,000 per month. One year later, in 1947, it was 282,000 per month. The next year, it was another 220,000 per month. We can expect that most of these 64, 65 and 66 year olds are quite interested in retiring in any given month, so a figure of 300,000 people leaving the labor market sounds like baby boomers are retiring, and nothing more dramatic than that.

Obviously that’s significant for a lot of reasons, but seeing a figure like 300,000 people leaving the labor market is precisely what we should be expecting given the demographics of the United States. It’s unreasonable to suggest that this is unexpected news or cause for alarm.

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Those numbers sound off to me. From Wikipedia.


Year  	Av. pop  	Live births 	Deaths 	   Natural change 	Crude birth rate (per 1,000) 	Crude death rate (per 1,000) 	Natural change (per 1,000) 	Fertility rates
1945 	139,994,000 	2,858,000 	1,401,719 	1,456,281 	20.4 	10.0 	10.4 	2.42
1946 	140,008,000 	3,411,000 	1,395,617 	2,015,383 	24.1 	10.0 	14.1 	2.86
1947 	145,023,000 	3,817,000 	1,445,370 	2,371,630 	26.6 	10.0 	16.6 	3.18
1948 	148,013,000 	3,637,000 	1,444,337 	2,192,663 	24.9 	9.8 	15.1 	3.03
1949 	149,336,000 	3,649,000 	1,443,607 	2,205,393 	24.5 	9.7 	14.8 	3.04
1950 	151,868,000 	3,632,000

Live births are the metric we want if we’re talking about the number of people expected to retire. That came to 284,000 per month in 1946, then 318,000, 303,000, 304,000 and 302,000 in 1950. 1954 to 1964 were over 4,000,000 per year or 333,000 per month.

There was never a year of 7.5 million growth, even if immigrants were added in. That only adds about 100,000 total in 1946. And while the baby boom was real, it amounted to a 20% increase in births, so earlier years would have contributed numbers in the same ballpark.

I don’t see how the 300,000 leaving the labor market can be even mostly attributed to boomers retiring. My guess is no more than 10%.

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Yep. I voted for record corporate profits and the biggest gain in the Dow over any 4 year period in history.

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Thanks for finding the live births metric. I was looking for that, and I wasn’t able to pinpoint it. Unsurprisingly, my contradictory information also came from Wikipedia. Just goes to show.

Using your numbers, there were 3.4 million live births in 1946, which is 284,000 per month. Why should we not expect something like 284,000 people each month to leave the labor force just due to ageing? That’s a pretty straightforward assumption to make - that the monthly number of retirees will closely track the number of people turning 65 each month. To assume this isn’t the predominant factor in people leaving the workforce, you’d have to assume a large number of people either tragically died too soon, or retired early, or stayed on at work for some unspecified reason. But those last two categories will cancel out over the long term; everyone retires eventually.

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That’s my point, really. Although there is some advantage to retiring at 65, there’s no reason for everybody to so and no reason to think that everybody does. The retirement age is probably a bell curve, with small numbers in their 40s and 50s, a peak in the 60s and 70s, and small numbers in the 80s and 90s. My 10% guess was a stab at how many people retire at 65 exactly. That will be enhanced by the smaller percentages of people of other ages retiring, so the total of people moving out of the work force because of retirement will be larger but historically other factors like going to school and disability have had higher impact on leaving the workforce than age retirement.

My impression is that people are staying in the workforce longer - they’re healthier and generally have less physical jobs - so the peak retirement age is slowly moving up. This keeps the number of jobs available for younger workers down. Additionally, other indications are that when older workers leave jobs, those jobs are less likely to be refilled than if a younger person left, so retirees may have a larger impact on jobs permanently lost.

Both certainly appear to contribute to the shortage of jobs available today. The number economists use is that 125,000 new jobs must be created to keep steady with population growth. Anything over that drops unemployment. That’s why the unemployment numbers have been moving down but very slowly the past couple of years.

In the longer term, though, the larger numbers of boomers retirees will definitely have an impact, creating many jobs that will need to be filled no matter how much employers want to skimp on hiring. We’re not properly educating or training people to fill those jobs. The energy industry is again and coming up against a huge shortfall, as shown in Gaps in the Energy Workforce Pipeline. Ironically, I’m much more worried about the shortage of trained personnel for jobs in the future than I’m concerned today about a steadily, if slowly, growing workforce.

And that Wikipedia page in your link is looking at resident population, which is clearly a function of troops being overseas for the war not being counted as residents. That huge jump is merely the effect of transferring troops home after the war’s end.

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Cite?