Mort Zuckerman, publisher of US News & World Report, has been on a bit of a tear lately about unemployment. He wrote a column last Friday for the Wall Street Journal, explaining how the “improvement” in jobless numbers last week was really no such thing.
Don’t be fooled by the headline unemployment number of 8.1% announced on Friday. The reason the number dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July was not because more jobs were created, but because more people quit looking for work.
There’s two ways to increase the value of a fraction – increase the numerator (the good way) or decrease the denominator (the bad way). Guess what Obama’s policies have done?
96,000—that’s how many new jobs were added last month, well short of the anemic 125,000 predicted by analysts, and dramatically less than the (still paltry) 139,000 the economy had been averaging in 2012.
In order to have a true net growth in employment, the number of new jobs created each month needs to be around 350,000 in order to absorb the new entrants into the workforce. These would be the high school and college graduates who are experiencing the appallingly high unemployment rates in their demographic these days.
The alarming numbers proliferate the deeper you look: 40.7% of the people counted as unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more—that’s 5.2 million “long-term” unemployed. Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, even though the population since then has grown by 31 million.
That is why the unemployment rate is so artificially low. If the same number of people were counted in the available workforce as in 2009, the unemployment rate would be well into double-digits.
Zuckerman posits some concrete steps he would implement in order to improve things. I only agree with #2 to a partial extent and #3. The others are really feel-good options, although they are still better than anything Obama has even considered, let alone actually done.
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