Part time job crisis, Employment rate and economy distorted, Election year protection of Obama and Democrats, Record part time jobs count as full time in stats, Financial markets and economy worlds apart
“11.4%: What the U.S. unemployment rate would be if labor force participation were back to January 2008 levels.” …James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, June 2013
“Approximately 1 million more people could only find part time employment since Obama took office in January 2009.”…Citizen Wells August 2013
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”…George Orwell, “1984″
Thursday, July 3, 2014 was another day of Orwellian employment data reporting, straight out of “1984.”
The US Labor Dept. reported 288,000 new jobs in June.
The media and financial markets went wild.
From “1984” by George Orwell.
“But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”
We know that for years now many of the jobs that were added were part time jobs. They count as full time jobs in the Labor Dept. stats.
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution August 5, 2013.
“Welcome to the Obamcare economy. From McClatchy:
“The July government employment report released Friday showed the job market treading water.”And a closer look at one of the two measures the Labor Department uses to gauge employment suggests that part-time work accounted for almost all the job growth that’s been reported over the past six months. …” ‘Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,’ said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. ‘That is really remarkable.’”Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs.” ‘That is a really high number for a six-month period,’ Hall said. ‘I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.’ “”
From the Duke University Fuqua School of Business December 11, 2013.
“Nearly half of U.S. companies are reluctant to hire full-time employees because of the ACA. One in five firms indicates they are likely to hire fewer employees, and another one in 10 may lay off current employees in response to the law.
Other firms will shift toward part-time workers. More than 40 percent of CFOs say their companies will consider switching some jobs to less than 30 hours per week or targeting part-time workers for future employment.”
An example from the media.
From Rex Nutting at Mark Watch July 3, 2014.
“The payrolls report is right, and GDP isn’t”
“No, the economy really did not tank in the first half of the year.
You could be excused for thinking it did. After all, gross domestic product plunged at a 2.9% annualized rate in the first three months of the year, according to the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Which means that, even if GDP rebounds at a 3.2% rate in the second quarter, as expected, the level of real GDP at the end of June would be scarcely higher than it was in December.
Two quarters of essentially no growth sounds a lot like a recession. Should we be worried?
Not at all. Almost certainly we are not in a recession, nor are we heading into one soon. How do we know? Because all of the other economic data we have — and we have a lot of data from a lot of different sources — disagrees with the GDP report.”
“Payrolls are rising at a 1.9% pace so far this year”
Read more:
Hey Rex, how about looking at the GDP and the real payroll numbers.
For example, 111,000 more people in June could only find part time work.
Remember, many people are working multiple part time jobs to make ends meet. Each one of those part time jobs could be counted as a job added.
The same day Market Watch provided the following information with less fanfare.
“Part-time work jumps in June by nearly 800,000”
“One interesting nugget in the June jobs report was the rise in the number of people who worked part-time.
While it’s a number that flops around from month to month — the standard deviation is 287,000 — it jumped by 799,000, which was the largest one-month gain since January 1994. At the same time, there was a 523,000-person drop in full-time workers, the first decline since October.”
Read more:
A voice of reason from Zero Hedge July 4, 2014.
“There is a growing gap between the financial markets and the real economy.
…
Six years ago, many investors were way out over their skis. Giant financial institutions were brought to their knees…
The survivors pledged to themselves that they would forever be more careful, less greedy, less short-term oriented.
But here we are again, mired in a euphoric environment in which some securities have risen in price beyond all reason, where leverage is returning to rainy markets and asset classes, and where caution seems radical and risk-taking the prudent course. Not surprisingly, lessons learned in 2008 were only learned temporarily. These are the inevitable cycles of greed and fear, of peaks and troughs.
Can we say when it will end? No. Can we say that it will end? Yes. And when it ends and the trend reverses, here is what we can say for sure. Few will be ready. Few will be prepared.”
Read more:
Clearly the financial markets are salivating with enthusiasm when they should be trembling.
We have a part time job crisis.
And don’t forget:
The labor force participation rate is 2.9 percent lower than when Obama took office.
There are 11,591,000 more people not in the labor force now than when Obama took office.
Feeling euphoric?
Citizen WElls 