If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
201,000
Fewer Americans Employed in March, But Wages Continue Rising
(CNSNews.com) - The number of
Americans working in March declined by 201,000, dropping from 156,949,000 in
February to 156,748,000 in March, according to the data released today by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The labor force participation
rate also fell by two-tenths of a point, from 63.2 percent to 63.0 percent.
The economy added 196,000
non-farm jobs in March, with notable gains in health care and in professional
and technical services, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
The unemployment rate was
unchanged at 3.8 percent, within a tenth of a point of the 3.7 percent
Trump-era low.
In March, the nation’s civilian
noninstitutionalized population, consisting of all people age 16 or older who
were not in the military or an institution, reached 258,537,000. Of those,
162,960,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively
seeking one.
The 162,960,000 who participated in the labor force equaled 63 percent of the 258,537,000 civilian noninstitutionalized population.
The number of Americans counted as not in the labor force, 95,577,000, increased in March, but with the growing number of retiring Baby Boomers, this number has not changed much in recent years.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.6 percent), adult women (3.3 percent), teenagers (12.8 percent), Whites (3.4 percent), Blacks (6.7 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.7 percent) showed little or no change in March.
Wages continued rising last month. In March, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $27.70, following a 10-cent gain in February. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent.
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for January was revised up from +311,000 to +312,000, and the change for February was revised up from +20,000 to +33,000. With these revisions, employment gains in January and February combined were 14,000 more than previously reported. After revisions, job gains have averaged 180,000 per month over the last 3 months.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday that for the week ending March 30, initial unemployment insurance claims (seasonally adjusted) totaled 202,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's revised level and the lowest level for initial claims since December 6, 1969 when the number was 202,000.
Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis
Stimulus
and Subsidies
Source: Jared Bernstein’s analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics in “Men
Without Work” by Nicholas Eberstadt
Small
Business
Stigma
Mark Zuckerberg’s
Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and
industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The 162,960,000 who participated in the labor force equaled 63 percent of the 258,537,000 civilian noninstitutionalized population.
The number of Americans counted as not in the labor force, 95,577,000, increased in March, but with the growing number of retiring Baby Boomers, this number has not changed much in recent years.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.6 percent), adult women (3.3 percent), teenagers (12.8 percent), Whites (3.4 percent), Blacks (6.7 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.7 percent) showed little or no change in March.
Wages continued rising last month. In March, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 4 cents to $27.70, following a 10-cent gain in February. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent.
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for January was revised up from +311,000 to +312,000, and the change for February was revised up from +20,000 to +33,000. With these revisions, employment gains in January and February combined were 14,000 more than previously reported. After revisions, job gains have averaged 180,000 per month over the last 3 months.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday that for the week ending March 30, initial unemployment insurance claims (seasonally adjusted) totaled 202,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's revised level and the lowest level for initial claims since December 6, 1969 when the number was 202,000.
Danny Newell, an unemployed logger, at his home in Indian
Township, Maine, on Oct. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis
Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but
how about those who stopped looking for work?
December 2, 2016 Updated: December 5, 2016
Share
What has been called a “quiet catastrophe”
has been unfolding in America: the
collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently,
for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair
in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates there are
10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for work. According to
calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women are in the same
situation.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced
a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs, but thought
needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent situation.
How to address this crisis depends on what
one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the prime-age employment
rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for possible responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser to Vice
President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection Agenda:
Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in the jagged
line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that had been
lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the straight trend
line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt represent two
typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment problem.
If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have
actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
Bernstein published the graph in a chapter
he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in which he critiques
Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a missing demand
for labor.
“If you look at the employment rate for
prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses
since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an interview. “That doesn’t sound
to me like a group that has given up. It sounds to me like a group that is not
facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem is a detachment
from work.
Using various government databases,
Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the workforce
and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers, seem to have
few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a church or their
communities. They spend most of their time entertaining themselves with TV or
hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers that they used illegal
drugs.
Bernstein counters this portrait by noting
that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment opportunities to
suffering from depression, which then leads to these men planting themselves on
the couch.
As to the individual motives of the
non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump is to
aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal government
using a number of different tools.
An officer waits to escort Harvey Lesser, an unemployed software
developer, from his apartment after serving him with a court order for eviction
in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 11, 2009.
Stimulus
and Subsidies
Bernstein believes the key to the downward
trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. He favors
trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade imbalances, which will
create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an infrastructure
program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he said.
He would like to see the federal government
get involved in communities that “don’t have enough businesses, child care
slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic market failure.”
The federal government could subsidize
private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to move
their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors special efforts to
help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees finding ways to help
this population is key to addressing the problem of non-working adults. He
estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20 million with a felony
conviction in their past.
Bernstein supports the Ban the Box
initiative, which calls for removing the box on employment applications that
must be ticked by anyone with a criminal record.
He also would like to see direct job
creation. The federal government would offer a heavily subsidized wage, and at
the local level there would be training for specific jobs that would be
available in that area.
He would also like to see the federal
government fund an apprenticeship program, which would involve recruiting local
businesses.
Finally, Bernstein wants to see the federal
government get the macro economic policies right to support full employment.
This means using monetary policy—primarily interest rates set by the Federal
Reserve—and fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. In Bernstein’s view, we
took our foot off the pedal of fiscal stimulus too soon—the United States
should have carried larger deficits in the years following the Great Recession.
Small
Business
Eberstadt said it is “small not big
business that employs most Americans.” Over the last eight years, he said,
there has been only marginally more small business births compared to small
business deaths. A healthy labor market will be one with “many, many new
businesses being formed,” he said. Part of the solution? Undo regulatory
strangulation and rationalize the tax code.
While Eberstadt agrees that manufacturing
jobs are important, he would urge the Trump administration not to “fetishize”
manufacturing jobs. The percentage of manufacturing jobs in developed economies
around the world has steadily dropped. “Jobs that employ people are good,”
Eberstadt said, “whether they have the word manufacturing in them or not.”
In order to protect the manufacturing jobs
we do have, Eberstadt urges that we not get into a trade war with China,
Mexico, or other countries, saying that trade wars lose jobs, they don’t create
jobs.
Clearly there has been a change in the way most people think about what
is decent and appropriate for able-bodied, working-age men to do with their
lives
— NICHOLAS EBERSTADT, economist, American Enterprise Institute
Because our entitlement programs are
administered locally, they tether people to the states in which they are
receiving benefits. Finding a way to cut that tie will give people mobility,
which will open up more job opportunities.
Eberstadt’s book is meant to initiate “a
broad conversation on our ‘men without work’ problem, a conversation of many
voices and differing perspectives.” One important solution is to bring this
mostly invisible problem “into the public spotlight.”
Shortcomings in the data we have limit the
kinds of conversations we have. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count
the 13.6 million people who have stopped looking for work as unemployed. When
the American public is given an unemployment rate of 4.9 percent, the crisis of
the non-working is hidden from them.
The government surveys that are
conducted do not reveal the mindsets of those men who are disconnected
from work—vital information for anyone who wants to understand this crisis. The
Social Security Disability Insurance program does not have an effective audit
that would tell us whether it is being used as a substitute for employment
insurance.
Stigma
Eberstadt notes that relevant context for
the crisis of the non-working is a change in our society’s “mores, and
viewpoints, and motivations.”
“Clearly there has been a change in the way
most people think about what is decent and appropriate for able-bodied,
working-age men to do with their lives in their prime working ages,”
Eberstadt said.
Over half of non-working men in their prime
years are getting money from at least one government disability program,
according to Eberstadt. These funds, Eberstadt writes, finance the
non-working’s decision not to work.
He would like to see these programs have a
work requirement, as was done 20 years ago with single mothers on welfare.
Requiring work stigmatizes non-work and so provides a moral incentive for
individuals to move off the couch and back into the workaday world.
Bernstein writes he sees “no good for
making these programs less generous or further conditioning them on work.”
Stigma, Eberstadt said, “is often a kinder
and gentler way of achieving social objectives than police power.”
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
*
Efforts
by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W.
Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would
likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for
America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
Mark Zuckerberg’s
Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and
industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
MEXICO’S INVASION by invitation!
"The
amnesty activist also said that the “border has been a crooked proposition from
the beginning, and it will continue to be twisted to meet political ends,”
adding that many open-borders activists still insist that “people didn’t cross
the border, the border crossed them.”
*
“At
some point we will have to accept the fact that the border between Mexico and
the United States is nothing more than an invention. It was demarcated in 1848,
following a war that cost Mexico about half its territory (it’s no coincidence
that cities like Los Angeles, San Antonio and San Francisco have Spanish
names),” Ramos said. “Also, it’s been said a thousand times that many people
didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. And the cultural and
commercial ties between the two sides remain in place to this day. Look at the
fellowship exhibited by cities like El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
even if barbed wire and concrete barriers have been erected in some places
along the divide.” LA RAZA SUPREMACIST JORGE RAMOS
*
1. What nation occupied the land for
300 years on which Mexicans now live?
2. What nation purchased 525,000 sq. miles of that land from Mexico for $15 million dollars?
3. What nation has a tougher immigration policy than the one who bought the land?
4. What nation built a wall along its Southern border to keep out illegal aliens?
5. What nation has millions of Mexican and Central American immigrants who came here legally and who don't want any illegal immigrants invading their country, stealing their jobs and bringing gangs, crime, drugs, infectious disease and human trafficking along with them?
6. What nation has millions of legal Latino immigrants who are proud to be citizens of a host country that is a sovereign nation with defined borders and with more individual freedoms and economic opportunities than any place on earth?
7. What people would like to tell the race-baiting, Jose Ramos, "Vete a la mierda!"?
2. What nation purchased 525,000 sq. miles of that land from Mexico for $15 million dollars?
3. What nation has a tougher immigration policy than the one who bought the land?
4. What nation built a wall along its Southern border to keep out illegal aliens?
5. What nation has millions of Mexican and Central American immigrants who came here legally and who don't want any illegal immigrants invading their country, stealing their jobs and bringing gangs, crime, drugs, infectious disease and human trafficking along with them?
6. What nation has millions of legal Latino immigrants who are proud to be citizens of a host country that is a sovereign nation with defined borders and with more individual freedoms and economic opportunities than any place on earth?
7. What people would like to tell the race-baiting, Jose Ramos, "Vete a la mierda!"?
ANSWERS:
1. Spain
2. United States
3. Mexico
4. Mexico
5. United States
6. United States
7. Latino Americans and other Americans who are not liberal Democrats.
2. United States
3. Mexico
4. Mexico
5. United States
6. United States
7. Latino Americans and other Americans who are not liberal Democrats.
FROSTY WOOLDRIGE
DOUBLING AMERICA’S POPULATION: A
tragedy in the making!
*
*
Do you want your children to face the ominous ecological,
sociological and cultural clashes they will encounter with an added 50 million
legal immigrants? Do you want your kids to face 100 different languages in your
schools? In Denver, my city, we must contend with 173 different languages
in our classrooms. Do you want to pay ever-increasing amounts of your
taxes toward housing, feeding, medicating, educating and caring for 50 million
foreign-born immigrants who lack any qualifications, any cultural affinity,
and/or any educational abilities to contribute to our first world economy and
society?
*
If you think the future will
be pretty for your kids, just look at what’s happening in Detroit-istan,
Minneapolis-istan, Miami-istan, Los Angeles-Mexico or the murder capital of
America—Chicago. If you think the 60,000 plus homeless living in tent
cities in Los Angeles and 11,000 homeless in San Francisco can’t be solved, how
do you think we will solve millions of immigrants from Africa, Indochina,
India, Mexico and heaven knows where else in the world?
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