According to David Stockman, former Budget Director for Ronald Reagan, the monthly jobs report which shows an unemployment rate of 4.1%, characterized as “Full Employment”, is grossly misleading. The most recent report shows that there are 72.7 million full time jobs in the United States, the very same number reported in December of 2007. In other words, we haven’t added a single full time job to the economy in 10 years. The job growth we perceive consists entirely of part-time jobs.
Again, this is all according to Stockman, as reported on MSNBC Live With Stephanie Ruhle this morning. I don’t where to confirm these details, but I wouldn’t be surprised based on what I’ve seen if his statement is accurate.
My first thought is that 2007 was the peak just before the Great Recession. That looks like a cherry-picked start date. What’s so magical about it, as opposed to 1997 or 2009?
The 4.1% is misleading in other ways as well. Because it only counts people who are actively seeking employment. And the number of people who are not actively seeking employment has increased enormously over the years, meaning that the unemployment rate has gone down for that reason alone.
[This was a big Republican talking point when campaigning against Obama/Clinton. At that time, Democrats were very fond of the unemployment % number and Republicans thought much less of it. I imagine many people are realigning their positions now.]
I’d assume the date was picked because the number is the same as now, i.e., using a coincidence to highlight the problem.
I think it indicates that the claims of job growth in the past 10 years are not what they are presented as. There are plenty of people still struggling to make a living, at the same time those who are securely employed or not in need of a job see some sort of progress being made when it is not. You can say that we have recovered from the Great Recession since we now finally have the same number of full time jobs, but that means we had no gains for 10 years when we should have had substantial growth in this area. On top of that will be the residual damage to culture and economy from a 10 year period of recovery from a man-made disaster.
This is part of the reason you-know-who is now the president, the people at the bottom of the pyramid with the weight of everyone else on their backs haven’t seen any improvement at all, it’s certainly no wonder that they would reject any establishment candidate.
If there is not growth in full time jobs now after this long recovery period then we are actually not progressing at all, getting back to where we were 10 years ago with no more progress is actually serious regression.
The official number is the U3 rate. You want U4 or U5. 4.4 and 5.0 respectively. All in one BLS chart.
I’m trying to find it but I saw a chart of all the rates together. The rate change curve, though at different levels, were a near perfect match in terms of shape.
Not the exact chart I saw before but it illustrates the point I was making. The various rates all track together.
It just depends on how good or bad you want to make things look.
For consistency, the U3 rate has always been the official one.
If you had asked people in 2008 if having the same number of jobs as in 2007 was a possibility, the vast majority of people would have taken that offer.
Whether this trend is good or not is certainly debatable and relies heavily upon what kind of work a person is looking for, how they want their job to fit into their overall lifestyle, and other factors.
I’d imagine the 10-year data range is an artifact of the fact that the BLS makes the last 10 years worth of data easily available, rather than any deliberate attempt to cherry-pick data.
Regardless, the average household does seem to be struggling to make a living. As a data point, the Census Bureau’s annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States (warning: PDF) is showing that the median household apparently stuck, on an inflation-adjusted basis, at 1996-levels of income. This is despite Real GDP Per Capita growing in the neighborhood of 1.3% annualized (Real gross domestic product per capita (A939RX0Q048SBEA) | FRED | St. Louis Fed) over the same time period.
Emphasis added. How do you know what “should” have happened? Which other Great Recession are you comparing this one to?
The fact is we lost a shit-load of jobs in the Great Recession, and the economy can only add jobs so fast. But I thought most people were aware that much of the job growth recent was part time jobs. I certainly was. Was there any important legislation that passed in the last 10 years that you know of that might have affected whether employers hire full time vs part time people?
I meant the growth that should have occurred if the Great Recession had not occurred. Considering that it did occur we haven’t done that bad, but in terms of full time jobs we have not grown since the time just before the Great Recession, and that is the meaningful measure of economic growth for a large percentage of the population.
There is the ACA, but the cost of benefits associated with full time employment existed before that. It’s the lack of legislation, or generally useless legislation that has been the problem. There was far less stimulus spending than needed under the circumstances of the last 10 years, usually with the excuse that it would increase the deficit, and mainly from those who just decided to blow up the deficit with a giant tax break for the rich while do nothing to reduce the payroll tax which would actually incentivize employers to hire and provide additional real income to existing employees. Just like stagnant wage growth we see the figures trotted out for the economy only represent the state of affairs for the upper tiers of our society, and there is no indication that will change.
OK, but also keep in mind that national numbers don’t tell the whole story, especially when we’re looking at the effect on electoral politics. The economy where I live, in Silicon Valley, has never been batter. It’s boom times like never before, and housing prices are through the roof (no pun intended). My friends in CT tell me a completely different story, and I’m sure you get many different stories when you travel to places like West VA, Michigan and elsewhere.
We hear a lot of complaints from “the heartland” about how they keep hearing how good the economy is, but they’re not feeling it. People know when they are hurting or their relatives are hurting or their friends are hurting, even if GDP and the DOW look great.
This is nothing new. Right wingers were very aware of the problems of the Obama recovery. Now that it is Trump’s economy we don’t here about the problems so much from them. Thankfully we have Stockman.
What seems clear to me is that there are huge distortions in the labor market. People simply refuse to go into new lines of work. People used to move to jobs. They don’t now. People used to improve their skills. They’re too old now. People used to evaluate the cost of education in relation to future attainable salary. Look at what jobs are open, choose major accordingly. Now subsidized loans and bad advisors muddy this calculation for a great many.
This sounds like a “people in my day were less lazy dammit” rant to me. Got any evidence of this? (If I were doing a rant like this I’d flip it… employers used to train their employees - they don’t know. employers used to provide pension security and reward seniority - they don’t now).
There have always been problems due to local economic situations, often regional, or based on the type of work. The inclination of people to want to stay put where they have lived and worked for a long time does contribute to the overall problem. West Virginia depends on a coal industry that is never coming back. People from there can move somewhere else, but it’s not easy for a coal miner to find a job in Silicon Valley, and it’s not that easy to retrain low tech workers for high tech jobs. Waiting for comebacks, or new industry to move in contributes to the overall societal costs associated with unemployment, greater costs in welfare, the urge to offer tax breaks to new industry that don’t cover the real costs associated with them, the lack of revenue for necessary government functions, increased social problems such as disease, crime, and illiteracy. And I don’t see any states putting out the welcome mat for unemployed low tech workers from other states. It was certainly easier back in the olden days, when there was a local lack of employment people moved west to settle new territory. We don’t have new physical territory now, the new territory is in new technology and growth industries, but some of those like law enforcement and healthcare are dependent on public money that isn’t being generated for income tax revenue.
Still, if Stockman’s figures are correct, we have not had an increase in full time jobs over the last 10 years, and the population has been growing in that time, meaning the economy has not improved for the lower tiers, it has actually deteriorated.
If you look at this graph, it looks like we are increasing at the same rate as has been the historical case, it’s just that we had a big setback during the GR. And it looks like the number is definitely higher than it was in 2007.
I don’t see Stockman’s figures anywhere in that, or in the Bureau of Labor Statistics site either. My personal points are still valid I think, but I can’t defend the figures Stockman cited.
ETA: I used the 10Y option which was sufficient for this topic.