Here are some of the remarks made by economists based on the updated Unemployment Rate released on Friday:" Unmitigated Disaster ", " It will be many years before the nation eliminates the current shortfall in jobs ", "We can see no silver lining in this employment report, which is weak, weak, weak."
You get the picture. Too bad the empty suit in the White House doesn't get it as he is trying to say he deserves another 4-year term to keep driving the American Economy into the ground. If your job performance at work was a poor as his, you would have been fired about a year into the job. Too Bad we can't do that with Obama.
The DEMS in Congress are Obama's cheerleaders and equally culpable. The GOP will only help if it suits their political gains and ultimately, the US Taxpayers are the ones getting screwed.
Well, let's interject some sobering reality into the situation - If you look at and include those who have fallen off the numbers who are counted, the unemployment issue is much, much worse than the present resident of the White House would like to admit...any wonder why some would seek work outside the US (or in Afghanistan) if this is the situation back home ?
Without Dropouts, Jobless Rate Would Be Over 11%
Wall Street Journal - July 8, 2011
The unemployment rate increased to 9.2% in June, the Labor Department reported, but if the recession hadn’t pushed so many people out of the labor market it would have been much worse.
The duration of unemployment continues to increase and sat at an average of 39.9 weeks in June. More than four million people who want jobs, or nearly a third of the unemployed, have been out of work for more than a year. Those are the people are hanging in and looking for work, but a large number have given up altogether.
The share of the population in the jobs market, called the labor-force participation rate, fell to 64.1% last month — the lowest level since 1984 when women were still just beginning to enter in full force. The participation rate peaked in 2000 and has been steadily declining since as the effect of women taking full-time jobs plateaued and Baby Boomers began to retire, but the decline accelerated sharply during the recession. The participation rate was 66% at the start of the recession and 65.7% when the recovery started in June 2009. If the participation rate were still at that level, the unemployment rate would be more than 11% right now.
With nearly a third of the unemployed out of work for over a year, it makes their reintegration back into the labor market more and more difficult. People out of a job that long tend to lose skills and experience long-term effects on their lifetime earning power. It’s even harder to reintegrate workers who have dropped out altogether.
There’s also a problem of underemployment. A comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. That number shot up in June to 16.2% from 15.8% a month earlier.
The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find. People who drop out of the labor force completely aren’t included in this tally.
Sometimes the jobless rate can rise because people re-enter the work force. That can be a positive sign for the economy, indicating a strengthening labor market and improved confidence. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in June. The number of people in the labor force dropped last month, while the number of people employed tumbled and the number of unemployed increased.
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