In the population of working age adults, the non employment rate is 26.9% (28,255,000 of 105,229,000). As a comparison to current levels, in 1998, the working age population growth was 80,662,000 and the non-employed in that population was 6,571,000 (8.15%).
Recently there has been several stories about 2000s being the Lost Decade of Jobs. No kidding. But what the stories fail to discuss is what are the reasons for the lack of job growth. Could it be because of economic policy? Heck, yeah - our current economic policy relies on wage suppression, cheap imports, more debt, abandonment of manufacturing sector (part of wage suppression strategy) and asset price inflation. But why don't we hear about this in the traditional media?
Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not. —Robert F. Kennedy
According to figures compiled by the America Society of Civil Engineers, a multi-year program of just repairing all existing U.S. infrastructure requires an additional $1.134 trillion dollars than already planned funding.
Using various employment multipliers specific to types of infrastructure (more discussion below), such a program spread over five years cen be expected to create 4.605 million direct and indirect jobs.
This last spring, I posted on how I thought that there were basically two recessions going on. That is that there were two sectors that made up a disproportionate share of the employment losses. From that post:
It is almost universally received wisdom that when the turn comes, we will have a "jobless recovery" where GDP turns up anemically, but unemployment stubbornly rises. Indeed the most controversial notion in some parts of the econoblogosphere is that of the "jobless recovery." as in, can it truly be a "recovery" if the number of jobless Americans continues to increase? Much moreso than dry GDP figures, wages and employment are what matter to the average American. I too have generally accepted the idea that any GDP recovery would be jobless, such that in April I made a graph showing what an unemployment spike will look like if the recession bottoms this summer, but a "jobless recovery" similar to 1991 and 2001 ensues:
Often times, non-economists attribute much more confusion to the ideas of Keynesian economics than is really the case. Take for example the idea of smoothing out business cycles. Anyone who's ever tried to keep to an exercise regime understands the concept intuitively. The fancy graph way of making the case looks like this:
The idea here is simple. The black line is the boom and bust cycle that characterizes un-managed markets. The red line is what happens when the government or private actors step in to manage the economy to smooth out these business cycles. Note that while at any one point, the black line may show a much higher rate of growth than the red over the long run, it ends higher.
Dead–cat bounce (n): a brief and insignificant recovery (as of stock prices) after a steep decline, etymology, from the facetious notion that even a dead cat would bounce slightly if dropped from a sufficient height. First used 1985.
The BLS Employment to Population ratio, also supports my posting concerning the under-perfomance of this decade's employment growth, relational to population growth.
To continue the current immigration policy and save the Banking Institutions, the U.S. will need to create millions of jobs -- right away. Since there is a job deficit of some 13 million jobs this decade, perhaps we should re-think immigration policy.
The economic health of the nation is generally measured by the BLS Unemployment statistic. The Unemployment statistic is not historically comprable due to methodology changes. My interest is in immigration policy, I need an immigration related statistic that trumps the low unemployment statistic.
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