Nation's Highest Minimum Wage Continues to Destroy Economy

I thought you had a hardon for "liberalisation". This is hardly that.

All the gains are among "undocumented immigrants", and what does that have to do with the millions of Americans who have dropped out of the workforce because they couldn't find a job?

The "bizarre" argument that people who don't have jobs aren't employed?

"Unemployed" has basically always meant somebody who was looking for work and couldn't find it -- not retirees, full-time students, people who chose to be stay-at-home parents, etc.

That definition seemed to work perfectly well until unemployment started going down and the "We can't admit to anything good happening under Teh Obama" crowd started desperately scrambling for excuses to rewrite it.

Yeah, gotta agree with John....the idea that we won't count people who have given up looking for a job as unemployed is one of the dumbest ideas ever. It's purely designed to make the presidents unemployment numbers look better.

Not surprising it works on the Obama faithful.

And apparently not people who have just given up on looking, because that doesn't look good on Dear Leader. Right?

Hell, that paints the Great Depression in a rosier light, too, doesn't it? All those poor bums stuck in the Hoovervilles weren't unemployed, after all! They were retired!

The way unemployment has been coutned has changed quite a few times. We all remember the salad days in the 30s and 50s when unemployment was over 40%. Remember - when they assumed women weren't going to work?

Women moving en masse into the workforce has certainly changed the perception of what unemployment numbers mean. The current stat has been used for 25 years or so, since the beginning of Clinton's term. But if you want the number of people calculated in the old manner, that number is available as well. U3 is the current standard - U5 is what conservatives always talk about. Of course, U3 is the standard they use when a Republican is in the White House as well. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Links?

As a teacher I call bullshit. You could maybe get away with saying most go to college and drop out before turning 19 but what you said doesn't quite gib with reality.

What is the researched percentage on those who go to college and not the work force and stay there after a semester?

https://www.google.com/search?q=wha...entage of high school students go to.college?

The wise and all knowing google says 73.8% of high school grads go on to college, vocational school, or junior college. You most certainly can't say "the number of 18 year olds equals the number of 65 year olds therefor the labor force isn't shrinking!" The way a certain poster wrongfully claimed.

As another poster also pointed out retirees are living longer and so the percentage of total population not working naturally goes up. People have crunched the numbers dozens of times, this is old hat, and the main reason the labor participation rate is going down is because a bulge of bad y boomers retiring combined with people in the greatest generation living longer. It isn't rocket science.

Not sure how this affects the stats, but (A) the "official" retirement age is no longer 65 and (B) a lot of Boomers continue working well past the official age.

And do you think kids weren't going to college prior to 2008 or something? The same number of people following the same post-high school patterns does not affect the size of the workforce, and I'm pretty sure college wasn't invented yesterday. In addition, the size of every age group younger than 30 is larger than any age group 65 or over. We have more people making babies now.

We're not talking about the percentage not working, we're talking about the number working, which is shrinking.

You don't have to rely on "people" to crunch the numbers, you can crunch them yourself. Even though I yesterday came up with a new Mars manned mission mode that should shave roughly 15 metric tons off the mass requirements, I'm pretty sure that the population numbers only require simple arithmetic, like adding and subtracting.

You do know that the labor participation rate is expressed as a percentage of total population, right? So more old people living longer in retirement along with more young people going to college (and they are going to college in much higher numbers than they used to), thus delaying entrance into the labor force, really does equal fewer people in the labor force as a percentage of population.

You can dance around that fact as much as you like but it isn't going to change.

From Jan 2007
Civilian non-institutional population - 230,650,000
Civilian labor force - 152,574,000 ---- Participation rate 66.3 percent
Employed 145,957,000 ---- Employment rate 63.3 percent

From Jan 2014
Civilian non-institutional population - 246,914,000
Civilian labor force - 155,460,000 ---- Participation rate 63.0 percent
Employed 145,224,000 ---- Employment rate 58.8 percent

The civilian labor force took a big dip (it peaked in Oct 2008 at 154,878,000 and didn't regain that number until May of 2012).
The number not in the labor force in Jan 2014 was 91,429,000.
The number not in the labor force in Jan 2007 was 77,676,000.

The civilian non-institutional population went up by 16,264,000.

The civilian labor force went up by 2,886,000. At the 2007 participation rate, it should have gone up by 10.783,000, so the number of people participating fell short by 7.9 million.

The number of employed went up by - wait. It went down by 733,000.

So you have 16,264,000 more people, but 733,000 fewer jobs.

All figures from the BLS.

I'm not getting into the number entering as leaving. What I wanna know is are those 18 yr olds going the whole 10 yds? Or are they starting and dropping out?

Also you said college and vocational is not college, it's higher Ed but you didn't say that. These aren't just semantics of terminology.

I have no idea what the drop out rate is. Can we agree that the vast majority of them are not actually seeking 40 hour per week jobs at age 18 though? That would be enough to disprove a certain someone's claims even before we add in the old people living longer and that the percentage of old people in the population is going up.

Again, unless college is some new thing, the only effect it would have on the size of the workforce is if the number of enrolled jumped way up. In fact, enrollment only went up by 3.5 million from 2007 to 2012, so that would account for less than half of the shortfall.

Want to avoid answering, do you? Are you in favour of "liberalisation" or not?

Like everything it depends on the situation and the specifics but in general, yes, at least to a degree.

Notice how that is a very different thing compared to your claim that I was some how a fundamentalist, which I am not.

Well, when you're insisting that liberalisation is the solution to deflation in the EU, you can see how I might get that impression.

Large sections of several national economies in Europe most certainly do need to be liberalized. That is why the growth rates have so often been so low for decades.

Not really I know a large percentage of kids who go straight into 40 hour weeks working retail or convenience stores. Then you have the ones going into oil, but that's more around here than most places.

Most kids I know that aren't in college are working 40 hour weeks, part time jobs don't really exist here. Or they go right up to the max under obama care. That would be the only reason a job for them would be part time is the obama care cut off.

Hell I've known of a good number of kids working 40 hours while in high school or college.

Warning to @gturner for math in the Red Room. Comments to MA.


(Muad's ghost agrees!)

He's fine, it only looks like maths.

If the jobless rate is falling, why are there so many bums in Seattle?

Bums don't count

It must be why they keep asking for change

Even the Wall Street Journal's hyper partisan editorial board has recognized the deception, admitting that work force participation is almost entirely explained by baby boomer retirements.

But,

http://www.wsj.com/articles/economys-supply-side-sputters-1424298482

Or maybe they were experiencing the joy of "funemployment"!