The Homa Files

This chart can not be shown too often.

It shows the commitment the Obama Administration  made to secure the trillion dollar faux-stimulus funding.

We were supposed to be around 5% unemployment now.

Oops

Source

Here’s the second chart …

The ratio of employed people to working age population ratio dropped about 4 percentage points during the financial crisis, and continues to hang at that level.

The Administration chalks it up to old folks retiring.

Sorry, guys.

First, more old folks are hanging onto their jobs to make ends meet and protect themselves in case their 401Ks tanks again.

Second, even if the old folks hang it up, shouldn’t the job openings be filled with one of the many unemployed?

Over 40% of the unemployed (5.3 million) have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks.

That accounts for over 3 points of the drop.

Those folks are “structurally” unemployed.

Either  (a) companies don’t need their kind of  skills anymore, or (b) their skills have atrophied during their long lay-off or (c) they’ve concluded that they can live fine on 99 weeks of unemployment payments.

Even if the employment water level continues to rise, those folks are likely to remain on the sidelines.

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James Pethokoukis of AEI – source of these charts —  is one of my favorite reads.

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This entry was posted on March 12, 2013 at 5:18 am and is filed under Employment - Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.