From International Business Times:
…Heidi Shierholz, an economist at The Economic Policy Institute, notes that given the backlog of 14.8 million unemployed workers in the U.S., at October’s rate of job growth it would take another 20 years to bring the unemployment rate back down to the 5 percent level of December 2007 (at the onset of the recession).
Shierholz also cited that the workforce dropped by 254,000 in October, pushing the labor force participation rate down to 64.5 percent, well below its prerecession level of 66.0 percent in December 2007…
I’m going with “absurd” to describe that 254,000 drop in labor force participation – I can’t imagine that that many people have really just given up and left the work force. That, to me, is a subtraction designed to keep the unemployment rate below 10%. I had figured that the Obama Administration would throw in the towel on manipulating the unemployment numbers to keep it below 10% after the election – but I guess they’re bound and determined to keep it up right through 2012.
Trouble is, they can fudge the numbers all they want, but out of work Americans want jobs. As long as there are so many millions of out work, no amount of Obama boosterism will change public attitudes about the effectiveness of his leadership.
We need to create, according to this article, 230,000 jobs per month in order to start reducing unemployment. While October’s number is the best in a long time, it isn’t nearly enough – and I bet that its worse than it looks (I do know that a lot of the jobs were with temp agencies; and tens of thousands of jobs were added by the Bureau of Labor Statistics “black box”. What’s a “black box”? Here ya go – scroll down a bit and there is a description). In order to create those jobs, we have to start producing things in the United States. Back to my old, old broken record – we have to make, mine and grow things. Lots more than we are now.
To do that, we need to cut taxes and slash regulations – and we also need to get our fiscal house in order so that the United States will appear a safe place to invest; we’ll have to balance our budget in the near term. The problem here is that Obama simply will not do these things – he doesn’t understand economics, at all, and is ideologically committed to a government-control model. If you tried to tell him, “hey, Mr. President, just unleash the American people and they’ll fix things, themselves”, he probably wouldn’t understand what you’re talking about.
Given this, it is unlikely we’ll get the policies necessary to fix the economy. It is doubtful, even with a Republican House, that we’ll get the policies which will merely stave off disaster. We’re in for a long, hard struggle, from what I can see. We’re going to get a lot poorer before we’re done – and it is becoming an absolute requirement that Obama be replaced at the helm.
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