There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not Have
Jobs
The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are
being told. Did you know that there are 100 million working age
Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work? No
wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not
have jobs! According to the federal government, there are 12.6
million working age Americans that are considered to be
"officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million
working age Americans that are not working either. The federal
government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor
force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate. In
fact, this is one of the key ways that the government
manipulates the unemployment numbers. The Obama administration
would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down
and that that since the start of the last recession about as
many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the
entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. Of course that
is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama
administration would have us believe. The truth is that the
percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just
about the same right now as it was two years ago. It was
incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly
difficult to get a job right now. So don't believe the hype that
things are getting much better. If you still do have a good job,
you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not
much hope that things are going to improve significantly any
time soon.
The first chart that I have posted below shows the total number
of "officially" unemployed workers in America. According to the
Federal Reserve, that number is currently 12,673,000. This chart
makes it look like the employment picture in America is getting
significantly better....
But if you dig deeper into the numbers you quickly see that this
is not true. A lot of those workers that were formerly
classified as "unemployed" have now been moved into the "not in
labor force" category. Since the start of the last recession,
the number of Americans not in the labor force has risen by more
than 8 million according to the Obama administration. The total
number of working age Americans not in the labor force now
stands at 87,897,000....
So when you add 12,673,000 and 87,897,000, you get a total of
100,570,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.
Yes, there are certainly millions upon millions of working age
Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.
But you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly
88 million working age Americans that do not have jobs and that
do not want jobs.
The Obama administration tells us that the labor force
participation rate is now the lowest it has been since 1984. But
back then, a very large percentage of women were staying home
and raising families. The percentage of stay at home mothers has
declined steadily since then.
So the truth is that the employment statistics that we are being
fed are not portraying an accurate picture of what is really
going on.
As a CNN article recently explained, there are millions of
Americans that say that they would like to have a job even
though they have not been "actively" looking for one in the past
four weeks. If those people were included in the unemployment
rate, it would immediately shoot up to around 11 percent....
About six million people claim they want a job, even though they
haven't looked for one in the last four weeks. If they were to
all start applying for work again, the unemployment rate would
suddenly shoot up above 11%.
If you want a much more accurate picture of what is really
happening to the employment situation in America, the key is to
look at the employment to population ratio. As I have written
about previously, the percentage of working age Americans that
have jobs is not increasing.
Let's take a look at the employment to population ratio for the
last six years for the month of March....
March 2007: 63.3%
March 2008: 62.7%
March 2009: 59.9%
March 2010: 58.5%
March 2011: 58.5%
March 2012: 58.5%
The percentage of the working age population that had jobs fell
rapidly during the recession and it has stayed very low since
then.
When Barack Obama tells you that "America is going back to work"
he is lying to you.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there are millions
of hard working Americans that have been sitting at home for
years hoping that a new job will come along.
Back in 2007, approximately 10 percent of all unemployed
Americans had been out of work for one year or longer.
Today, that figure is above 30 percent.
The average duration of unemployment in the United States today
is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.
And according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the
number of announced job cuts is actually rising again....
Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April, according to
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 — and up 11.2% from last
April — another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn’t doing
well.
Economic conditions in the United States have been steadily
getting worse for quite a while, but that is not the only reason
for our employment problems.
There are two other trends that I want to briefly mention.
1) A lot of jobs that used to be very labor intensive are now
being replaced by technology. Thanks to robotics, automation and
computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need as many
workers these days. Those are jobs that are never going to come
back.
2) As labor has become a global commodity, millions upon
millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas. Today, you are
not just competing for a job with your neighbors. You are also
competing with workers on the other side of the globe.
Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of
those countries. By sending our jobs out of the country, big
corporations can also avoid a whole host of rules, regulations,
taxes and benefit payments that they would be facing if they
hired American workers.
So U.S. workers are at a massive competitive disadvantage. Why
should a big corporation pay 10 or 20 times more for an American
worker when they can pad their profits by exploiting cheap
foreign labor?
The sad truth is that the value that the marketplace puts on the
labor of the average American worker is continually decreasing.
This is making it much more difficult to find a job and it is
keeping wages down.
In the old days, pretty much any man that was a hard worker and
that really wanted a good job could go out and get one.
But now all of that has changed. Back in 1950, more than 80
percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less
than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
And sadly, the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are
good jobs. As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the
jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.
So how are middle class families making it these days?
Many of them are going into tremendous amounts of debt. As a
recent CNN article detailed, the average debt load being carried
by those of us in the bottom 95 percent of all income earners
has risen dramatically over the past several decades....
In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar
they earned, according to research by two International Monetary
Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of
debt for every $1 in earnings.
Unfortunately, many American families are absolutely maxed out
at this point. According to one recent survey, approximately
one-third of all Americans are currently paying their bills
late.
If your goal is to live a middle class lifestyle, you need to
realize that the entire way that the game is being played is
changing.
In the old days, you could start out with a company as a young
person and stay with that company until you retired. If you
worked hard and you were loyal, there was a really good chance
that the company would recognize that and be loyal to you too.
These days, most companies are absolutely heartless when it
comes to their workers. The good job that you have today could
be gone tomorrow. Workers are increasingly being viewed as
"liabilities", and there is a good chance that the moment you
become "expendable" to your company you will be kicked out on
the street.
That is one reason why I am encouraging people to consider
starting their own businesses. If you work for someone else,
your security can be taken away from you at any moment. But if
you work for yourself, you aren't going to get fired.
Unfortunately, tough economic times are coming and things are
not going to be easy no matter what road you take. It will be
imperative to work harder than ever, to stay flexible, and to
never, ever give up.
Since the monthly jobs numbers were released on Friday I thought
I would update this article to reflect the latest figures.
The federal government has announced that the unemployment rate
has declined to 8.1 percent.
That certainly sounds like good news.
But knowing better, I immediately went and checked how the
employment to population ratio had changed.
Well, it turns out that the employment to population ratio has
fallen once again.
That means that a smaller percentage of working age Americans
had jobs in April than in March.
The following are the figures for the past three months....
February 2012: 58.6%
March 2012: 58.5%
April 2012: 58.4%
If the percentage of people that have jobs is going down, then
how can they claim that things are getting better?
The following are the two Federal Reserve charts posted above
after they have been updated with the new numbers. These charts
are very revealing.
1) There are now 12,500,000 workers that are "officially"
considered to be unemployed....
2) There are now 88,419,000 Americans that are considered to be
"not in the labor force". Please note that this number rose by
522,000 in just a single month!....
Okay, so now let's do the same math that we did before.
12,500,000 unemployed workers plus 88,419,000 Americans that are
"not in the labor force" equals 100,919,000 working age
Americans that do not have jobs.
That number just continues to climb at a very rapid pace.
When is the mainstream media going to start telling us the
truth? |