Mish drinks the unemployment koolaid

Just phonin' it in these days.

CNBC drinks the unemployment koolaid

Hey Rush Limbaugh, 12.4 million black people eating but not working!

Trump knows his own unemployment rate is fake, but touts it anyway. Sad.

Not-in-labor-force hit a new all-time high in May of almost 96 million.

President Trump used to think 223,000 jobs a month wasn't nearly good enough

Actually, to close the employment gap between today and pre-Great Recession America, we'd need 370,000 jobs a month for the next 50 months straight, four years.

Like that's going to happen.

If we had employment at the pre-recession percentage of population, we'd have 7.3 million more working in May 2018 than we do have

162.7 million employed at 63.2% instead of the 155.4 million actual at 60.4% in May 2018

Like unemployment generally, black unemployment is so low because near record numbers of them aren't in the labor force

And presto! Down comes the unemployment rate when you stop counting them.

It's a numbers racket for blacks no different than for everyone else.

Employers are still pretty stingy to the average Joe compared to 10 and 20 years ago

Trump has cut federal employment by a miniscule 0.3% November 2016 through April 2018

9000 jobs, a fart in a windstorm.

Federal employment peaked in 1990 at 3.2 million and hasn't averaged below 2.7 million since the mid-1960s.

As with ending abortion, cutting federal spending is only aspirational for Republicans in the same way that ending poverty and securing equal pay are only aspirational for Democrats.

Actually delivering on these promises would mean having to come up with new ones, which is too much like work.

The American Spectator singles out Michigan for its $16 billion in corporate welfare, but the cronyism trend is up 39% just in the top 10 states since 2015

The story is here, and is more than correct to state:

Unfortunately, crony capitalism is something both parties are willing to get behind. Part of the problem is that voters often approve of these subsidies when the phrase “bringing jobs to the state” is uttered.

We're more like China than we'd like to admit, where state-owned enterprise is the rule. We simply practice state-capitalism-lite.

The data is tracked comprehensively here, updated it appears through 2015. The last time I reported on this in 2015 the top ten crony states alone were up to $96 billion in corporate welfare handouts. Three years later the top 10's cronyism has grown to $133 billion, an increase of nearly 39%.

Free market capitalism this is not.

A jobs recovery to the trend line suggests we have a jobs gap of about 5 million in April 2018

The chart shows the trend line for the percent of the population employed in Aprils since 1948. Recovery to this trend line in April 2018 would mean about 62.3% employed instead of 60.3%, implying a jobs gap of about 5.1 million.

Miles to go before he sleeps, and promises to keep . . ..

Trump has no jobs achievement, let alone an historic one

The idea that Trump has an historic jobs achievement is based on the increasingly meaningless unemployment rate, which notoriously doesn't count many people who are not working. The idea that "essentially every American who wants a job could find one" is rubbish. For the anecdotal evidence, I suggest you ask any of the millions of unemployed and underemployed non-management people over the age of 50, most of whom got their walking papers in the Great Recession because they made too much money in the opinion of management. If you are looking for the hidden, nefarious, recalcitrant forces of deflation in the American economy, look there.   

The federal government actually tracks everyone who wants a job but still doesn't have one. They presently number 5.1 million, well above the average low for the data series in 2000 at 4.4 million. But even this number fails to capture the real scope of current labor slack.

If we had a real jobs recovery going on, we'd have employment at pre-Great Recession levels. We don't. Total employed as a percentage of the population in April 2018 is at not quite 60.4%. Before the recession it averaged 63.2% over the previous twelve years. That latter rate would yield 162.6 million working in April 2018 instead of the 155.3 million we actually have.

It's that simple. We have the people. What we're missing is 7.3 million of them working.

Them's the facts, no matter what the cheerleaders for Trump keep shouting.

Maybe dropouts from the labor force were a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result

The high rate of dropping out of the labor force we've become accustomed to since the Great Recession actually predates it by a decade, suggesting that dropping out may be a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result of it. Continued slow growth of GDP since the Great Recession can also be explained by the absence of these inputs.

Jeffrey Snider: Fix the suffering in the labor force or next time you might actually get socialism

Here:

The American labor force is suffering like it hasn’t since the 1930’s, but nobody seems willing to challenge Economists’ easily disproved claims.

Into that vacuum had swept Mr. Trump himself, but also Mr. Sanders. The mere election of the former didn’t immediately fix the problem; rather, things have gotten worse since the campaign ended (to be clear, it had nothing to do with Trump . . .). May Day is still only trending toward becoming an official holiday.

In a 2014 poll, 9.7% admitted to coming to work after smoking marijuana, which would have been 14.2 million Americans high at work at the time

Civilian employment averaged 146.3 million in 2014.

The story is here.

What labor shortage? We have 1 million more people 20 to 24 years old than we did in 1979, but 400,000 fewer counted in the labor force and 20,000 fewer actually working

What labor shortage? We have 800,000 more people 25 to 54 years old than we did 10 years ago, 830,000 fewer counted in the labor force, and 45,000 fewer actually working

What labor shortage? We have MORE teens in 2018 than in 1978, but 3.5 million fewer are counted in the labor force and 2.7 million fewer WORK

Total unemployment looks headed for a new cyclical low in 2018 similar to the year 2000

The year 2000 was also noteworthy for peak S&P 500, in August on a monthly average basis. The same may obtain for 2018. The market's average level in January already may have established the top for this cycle.

If we really had full employment in America, we wouldn't be missing 7.6 million working

The difference between 63.2% working before 2009 and 60.2% working in March 2018 is 7.6 million.