Senator Sessions on the Jobless Recovery and Part-Time America

[hvactec]

Last Friday, Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) gave the second in a series of speeches about the state of the U.S. economy. The full speech is here, and it is excerpted below:

Few things matter more to a working family than the pace of the economy, especially after a hard recession. If, on the one hand, it’s a rapid, strong recovery, jobs will return quickly, people will return the workforce, and a great deal of social suffering will be averted.

If, on the other hand, it’s a slow recovery, then businesses don’t create many new jobs, wages stagnate or fall, and the families continue to borrow from their savings to pay their bills. Life is spent wondering and worrying about the future.

We live today in the slowest “economic recovery” since the end of World War II.

read more Senator Sessions on the Jobless Recovery and Part-Time America | National Review Online

 

[ClosedCaption]

Ask Sessions where all the jobs are that were supposed to be created with the Bush Tax cuts are?

Then ask yourself if Sessions is a credible source.

 

[waltky]

Thanks, Obama - 62.8% labor force participation rate ties all time low...

92,594,000: Americans Not in Labor Force Hits All-Time Record; Participation Rate Matches 36-Year Low
May 2, 2014 -- A record 92,594,000 Americans were not in the labor force in April as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In March, according to BLS's non-seasonally adjusted data, there were 91,630,000 Americans not in the labor force. In April, that increased by 964,000 people to an all-time record of 92,594,000. The previous record was 92,534,000, set in January of this year. The BLS's seasonally-adjusted number for people not in the labor force--which was 92,018,00 for April--was also an all-time record. This was up 988,000 from the 91,030,000 seasonally adjusted number BLS said was not in the labor force in March. (The previous all-time seasonally-adjusted high for people not in the labor force was 91,8080,000, which occurred in December 2013.) "Seasonal adjustment is a statistical technique that attempts to measure and remove the influences of predictable seasonal patterns to reveal how employment and unemployment change from month to month," says BLS. "These seasonal adjustments make it easier to observe the cyclical, underlying trend, and other nonseasonal movements in the series."

The seasonally adjusted labor force participation rated dropped from 63.2 percent in March to 62.8 percent in April, matching a 36-year low. Prior to October 2013, the labor force participation rate had not gone as low as 62.8 percent since March 1978. In the last seven months it has matched that low in three months--October 2013, December 2013 and April 2013. BLS employment statistics are calculated using what BLS calls the civilian noninstitutional population. This includes all persons in the United States 16 and older, who are not on active duty in the military or in an institution such as a prison, nursing home, or mental hospital. The civilian noninstitutional population is divided into two basic parts: those in the labor force and those not in the labor force. To be in the labor force a person must either have a job or have actively sought a job in the last four weeks. A person not in the labor force is a person who neither had a job nor actively sought one. The unemployment rate is the percentage of people in the labor force who actively sought a job in the past four weeks but did not get one.

Because of the way the unemployment rate is calculated, the rate can actually go down even when the number of people who are employed is also going down. In April, the civilian noninstitutional population of people 16 and older was 247,439,000. Of these, according to BLS's seasonally adjusted numbers, 155,421,000 participated in the labor force (down 806,000 from the 156,227,000 who participated in the labor force in March). That yielded the labor force participation rate of 62.8 percent--matching the 36-year low. Of the 155,421,000 who participated in the labor force in April, 145,669,000 were employed (meaning they had some kind of job, including both full- and part-time jobs), and 9,753,000 were unemployed (meaning they looked for a job and did not find one).

The 9,753,000 who looked for a job and did not find one, and thus were "unemployed," equaled 6.3 percent of the 155,421,000 still in the labor force--yielding an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent. In March, in the then-larger civilian labor force of 156,227,000, there were 10,486,000 who actively sought a job and did not find one--yielding an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent. In March, according to BLS's seasonally adjusted numbers, there were 145,742,00 people who were employed. In April, that dropped by 73,000 to 145,669,000. Thus, in April, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate dropped at the same time the number of people with jobs dropped. (In the BLS's non-seasonally adjusted data, the number of people employed increased by 677,000 from March to April, climbing from 145,090,000 to 145,767,000.)

92,594,000: Americans Not in Labor Force Hits All-Time Record; Participation Rate Matches 36-Year Low | CNS News

See also:

Women Not in Labor Force Hits Record High
May 2, 2014 -- The number of women 16 and older not in the labor force climbed to a record high of 55,116,000 in April, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

This means that there were 55,116,000 women 16 and older who were in the civilian nonsinstitutional population who not only did not have a job, they did not actively seek one in the last four weeks. That is up 428,000 from the 54,688,000 women who were not in the labor force in March.

In April, according to BLS, the labor force participation rate for women was 56.9 percent, down from 57.2 percent in March. The labor force participation rate, as calculated by the BLS, is based on the civilian non-institutional population, which is the number of people in the country 16 or older who are not in the military or an institution.

The labor force participation rate is the percentage of this population that either has a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks. In April, according to BLS, the female civilian labor force was 72,835,000 which was down 340,000 from the 73,175,000 in March. The unemployment rate for women also decreased from 6.6 percent in March to 6.1 percent in April.

Women Not in Labor Force Hits Record High | CNS News

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Jobless recovery?

Based upon the latest pathetic economic growth number, we have a recovery-less recovery.

All the fault of Al Roker, the way they tell the tale.

 

[OnePercenter]

Jobless recovery?

Based upon the latest pathetic economic growth number, we have a recovery-less recovery.

All the fault of Al Roker, the way they tell the tale.

All brought to us by corporate America who want their Subsidies back.

 

[Londoner]

Last Friday, Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) gave the second in a series of speeches about the state of the U.S. economy. The full speech is here, and it is excerpted below:

Few things matter more to a working family than the pace of the economy, especially after a hard recession. If, on the one hand, it’s a rapid, strong recovery, jobs will return quickly, people will return the workforce, and a great deal of social suffering will be averted.

If, on the other hand, it’s a slow recovery, then businesses don’t create many new jobs, wages stagnate or fall, and the families continue to borrow from their savings to pay their bills. Life is spent wondering and worrying about the future.

We live today in the slowest “economic recovery” since the end of World War II.

read more Senator Sessions on the Jobless Recovery and Part-Time America | National Review Online

This is more than a slow recovery. We are witnessing a transition to low wage America - a transition which gives corporations higher returns. Starting with Reagan, jobs/manufacturing were aggressively outsourced to Communist China, a place where our capitalists could get their products made for dirt cheap. In addition to destroying American jobs, benefits and assistance programs (i.e., things that made it possible for Americans to consume so that small businesses could avoid layoffs) were slashed to make room for tax breaks to the wealthy. Cheap Chinese labor made our capitalists wealthy, but it undermined the wage-based consumption that sustained domestic growth during the postwar years.

Reagan sold America on low wages. He said that we needed to free capital to seek the cheapest possible operating conditions - which would provide greater incentives to inevstors. Who knew our big businesses would get in bed with freedom-hating nations, supplying them with brutalized workers w/wages @ less than $5/day. Our largest employer, Walmart, gets over 20% of their manufacturing from Communist China. And they don't pay their workers enough to survive, much less consume.

Reagan tried to fix this problem by expanding credit to consumers. Anyone alive in the 80s will recall when we all started receiving 3 credit card offers a week. Reaganomics was replacing wage-based consumption with debt-based consumption. This is why household debt exploded in the 80s. The new credit card/debt based economy worked well for 2 decades. However, by the time Bush 43 took the White House, the American consumer was borrowing more than he earned by a staggering margin. This was unsustainable. It got so bad, many American families borrowed against their artificially inflated home values in order to keep consuming and stay afloat. Of course, the system eventually blew up and now the American consumer can't spend enough in the aggregate to meet the demand needs of economic growth. Put simply, businesses lack consumers. They are sitting on historic cash, but they can't invest it in the domestic economy because the middle class consumer is de-leveraging from a 30 year borrowing binge, i.e., Morning in America brought to you by American Express, Visa and MasterCard.

Worse: any jobs that do come back to America are low wage shit jobs. Why? Because the American worker is now competing with Taiwanese sweatshops for jobs. Companies from Walmart to Apple can get their products manufactured by workers making less than $5/day . . . so they're not going to bring jobs back unless Americans will work for wages that won't pay the rent, even in a slum.

Here is what the OP doesn't understand.

Nike investors make more money when their sneakers are made in sweatshops. Walmart makes more profits when their average worker makes shit wages w/o benefits. Do you understand this? Capitalism wants one thing: higher returns. Therefore, capitalism's logic mandates the cheapest possible labor costs. Problem is, the cheapest possible labor costs come with a wage system where the worker cannot afford to consume (which consumption is necessary for economic growth). Worse: when consumers don't have enough money to buy things, businesses have to lay off workers. This has the effect of taking more consumers out of the economy, which means businesses have to layoff even more workers. It's a toxic cycle.

Welcome to Reagan's dream. Corporations finally have cheap labor. They make higher profits when they only have to pay the kind of shit wages that come with temp or part time jobs (w/o benefits). Of course, workers making shit wages can't buy the stuff they are producing - they can't go into main street stores and buy things so that our small businesses can grow. Henry Ford said the trend toward shit wages was the biggest flaw of capitalism - a flaw he fixed by paying his workers more money. A flaw the US government fixed during the postwar years with strict trade laws that prevented corporations from shipping jobs to Communist China. A flaw Reagan fixed by handing consumers credit cards and making easier for them to borrow themselves into economic death.The result is that Bush 43 and Obama inherited the most indebted class of consumers in world history. By Bush's second term Americans were borrowing, in the aggregate, 30% more than they earned. This kind of thing cannot be sustained. Which is why our crash has been so huge.

The Reagan expansion of credit (to replace wages/benefits) has failed.

America swallowed poison in 1980.

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Jobless recovery?

Based upon the latest pathetic economic growth number, we have a recovery-less recovery.

All the fault of Al Roker, the way they tell the tale.

All brought to us by corporate America who want their Subsidies back.

Oh, button it.

 

[OnePercenter]

Jobless recovery?

Based upon the latest pathetic economic growth number, we have a recovery-less recovery.

All the fault of Al Roker, the way they tell the tale.

All brought to us by corporate America who want their Subsidies back.

Oh, button it.

You wanted to know why, I told you.

 

[HelenaHandbag]

All brought to us by corporate America who want their Subsidies back.

Oh, button it.

You wanted to know why, I told you.

No, you did not. You just threw out another stale old chunk of progressive whiner boilerplate.

Grow up and wake up.

 

[Moonglow]

I can still remember the jobless recovery after the tech bubble during Boosh...

 

[Moonglow]

They are hiring in my area, come on down and get a job...

 

[OnePercenter]

Oh, button it.

You wanted to know why, I told you.

No, you did not. You just threw out another stale old chunk of progressive whiner boilerplate.

Grow up and wake up.

Possibly you should dust off your abacus and collect the net profit from the Forbes one-thousand over the last 10 years. You'll have the true answer.

Corporate America wants their subsidies back.

 

[JakeStarkey]

All the jobs lost becasue of Bush have been recovered and more besides.