How to Really Analyze US Employment Numbers

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Unemployment Rate vs Total Employment
Yes - the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, but it also masks a startling shift in the job market. The Labor Department said Friday that employers added 120,000 jobs last month. With that, the unemployment rate dropped to the lowest level in more than two and a half years.

But a key reason for the drop was that hundreds of thousands of people who could work had stopped looking for work. The report showed 487,000 people left the labor force in November -- for the Labor Department's purposes, they are not counted as unemployed.
What's important is total employment, which has barely budged. This means we're still facing a NET LOSS of over 2 million jobs since president Obama took office in 2009 - an absolutely abysmal performance, considering all the taxpayer money the government has thrown at the problem.

image002

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The above chart simply takes the total US employment number by month from 1/1/2001 through 11/1/2011, and divides that by the total US population for the same period.

Don’t let them tell you we’re “adding jobs”. We’re not.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Dennis Gorelik7:15 AM

    Could decline of employment ratio be explained by an aging population?

    ReplyDelete
  2. James Hancock8:21 AM

    www.shadowstats.com tells the story. Unemployment per number pre Bill Clinton are actually about 24%.

    Inflation is around 7%.

    ReplyDelete
  3. peterbromberg8:24 AM

    @Dennis
    I suppose that's a factor. But I think the real decline (which accelerates starting in 2009) is due to lack of creation of new jobs. Population's going up, job growth not keeping up with it.

    ReplyDelete

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