But what’s your point? The civilian labor force participation rate is basically (employed + unemployed)/(U.S. pop 16 and older). How does that measure connect with the argument you’re making?
The justification for this particular choice of age group is that it largely gets education and retirement out of the picture, measuring what % of persons in their prime working years are employed.
I’d recommend adjusting the time period of the table (upper right) to include the last 10-12 years. You see the catastrophic drop in the ratio during Bush’s Great Recession, and then its steady upswing during the past several years.
If you didn’t have the years along the X-axis, you wouldn’t be able to tell when Obama vacated the White House for Trump.
What graph are you looking at, precisely? The 5 and 10 year graphs show a line that’s very consistent since 2014 (with a slight temporary dip right before the 2106 mark). It doesn’t at all look to me like the labor force participation rate is trending up — at least not from that cite.
Importantly, the LFPR has remained very close to the numbers for which Trump blamed a misleadingly low unemployment rate. Does that no longer apply here?
I’d agree for a different reason. To wit, I’m not sure that anything is automatically disqualifying anymore in the age of Trump. Competitive-level sexual harassment, blatant racism, complete disregard for facts, settlements for fraud, barely disguised collusion with autocratic superpowers, these all seem to be in bounds.
At this point, I am afraid that rape and murder convictions might not immediately disqualify a candidate anymore. We’ve gone well past the point where admitting to smoking pot in the 1970s would doom a nomiation (which, in retrospect, was blindingly stupid). What bombshell would doom a nominee? Damned if I know.
Homosexuality would doom any GOP candidate. (Not Democratic ones, though).
Also, probably, heterosexual “submissive” conduct, if well-enough documented, would doom GOP candidates.
Pedophilia is fine for GOP candidates so long as it’s heterosexual, and “in the past,” as we’ve seen with Roy Moore.
Basically any conduct that seems macho and manly–including rape and murder, presumably, and certainly including white-collar crime (see Rick Scott, for example)–is fine for the GOP. But any conduct that makes macho, manly men uneasy is going to be an issue.
Hypothetically, yes. (There are already some right-wing pundits who are openly gay, and I gather they are considered by Republicans to be ‘enough’ in the token category—but for a politically-talented-enough reactionary/authoritarian, I suppose that could change.)
They have some more respectable ones than Milo. Andrew Sullivan comes to mind. And there’s a regular CNN contributor they put in on those panels where they want ‘the conservative point of view’ and lots of fireworks, a black guy whose name escapes me. (And I don’t know that he publicly identifies as gay.)
…checking, I see that wikipedia helpfully offers a Category page called “LGBT conservatives”:
The CNN commentator isn’t listed, so I guess he isn’t out.