December 2013 Jobs Numbers and Unemployment Rate were released this morning, Friday, January 10, 2014.
December Highlights:
December Highlights:
- 74,000 payroll jobs added. (November numbers were revised upwards.) Job growth has averaged 182,000/month over the past 12 months.
- Private jobs increased by 87,000.
- Government jobs decreased by 13,000.
- Unemployment rate ticked down to 6.7% (from 7.0%). The unemployment rate decreased across the board, for every ethnic, age, and occupation group, including teenagers. (The unemployment rate comes from a different source than the number of jobs which is why the unemployment rate can decline three tenths of a percent with only a minimal increase in the number of jobs. Over time, these two numbers closely parallel each other.)
- The alternate unemployment rate (which includes part time workers who want full time jobs, discouraged workers, and marginally attached workers) stayed the same at 13.1%. This is the lowest that it has been since November 2008, five years ago. One year ago, the alternate unemployment rate was 14.4%.
- The labor force decreased by 347,000 in December.
- Since the "trough" of the recession in late 2009/early 2010 in seasonally adjusted numbers:
- 7.6 million MORE jobs in total
- 8.2 million MORE private sector jobs
- 6.6 million MORE people working*
Since Bush left office & Obama took office (January 2009) in seasonally adjusted numbers:- 3.2 million MORE jobs in total
- 4.0 million MORE private sector jobs
- 2.4 million MORE people working*
- Private Sector Job Loss/Growth Since 2008 w/ Graph - UPDATED for DECEMBER.
- What Was the Unemployment Rate When Obama Took Office (compared to today)? - UPDATED for DECEMBER
- How Many Jobs Created or Lost Under Obama? - UPDATED for DECEMBER
- Jobs Lost/Gained Year by Year Since 1999 - UPDATED for DECEMBER
- Private/Government Jobs Gained/Lost Month by Month 2011 to 2013 - UPDATED for DECEMBER
- How Many Jobs Have Been Created in 2013 to date? - UPDATED for DECEMBER.
- How Many Government Jobs Lost or Added Under Obama? - UPDATED for DECEMBER.
- Private/Govt Jobs Gained/Lost Under Obama - UPDATED for DECEMBER
- How Many Jobs Lost or Gained in December 2013? - Not yet updated.
- How Many Jobs Lost or Gained Over the Past Year? (December 2012 through December 2013) - Not yet updated
- How Many People Left or Joined the Work Force (Civilian Labor Force) Since Obama Took Office? - UPDATED for DECEMBER
CNN just reports below (http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/24/news/economy/middle-class-economy/index.html?iid=HP_LN).
ReplyDeleteNumber 3 below sums up very well: "To this day, the United States still hasn't gained back all those jobs. The economy needs about 1.2 million jobs to get back to the 2008 level.."
7 SETBACKS FOR THE MIDDLECLASS
Five years into his presidency, Barack Obama is still falling short of his number one goal: to fix the economy for the middle class.
Sure, a recovery has been underway for most of his presidency, but it's still slow and uneven. And despite Obama's focus on the middle class, the improvement so far has largely benefited corporations and the ultra-rich.
Whether you blame Obama or a dysfunctional Congress, either way the recovery is hardly a middle-class success story.
1. Workers are taking home their smallest slice of U.S. income on record: At around $15.8 trillion a year, the United States produces more in annual economic output than ever before, but it's not the worker that's benefiting. Instead, corporate profits now account for their largest slice of that pie on record, whereas the slice for workers has been steadily declining.
2. Inequality has widened: The recovery has been good to families earning more than $394,000 a year, but the other 99% of Americans have barely felt it. The richest 1% of American families have captured 95% of the income gains in the recovery period spanning 2009 to 2012, according to economists at the forefront of income inequality research, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.
Meanwhile, income for the median American family has barely budged in recent years.
3. The job market still faces a gaping hole: From the job market's peak in early 2008 to its bottom in 2010, the U.S. economy lost 8.7 million jobs -- about half of which were in construction and manufacturing.
To this day, the United States still hasn't gained back all those jobs. The economy needs about 1.2 million jobs to get back to the 2008 level, and once population growth is added to the mix, the hole looks more like an abyss.
To fill that abyss, the economy still needs about 7.9 million jobs to get back to pre-recession conditions when unemployment was under 5%, according to Heidi Shierholz, economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Even with strong hiring, it could take at least five years to get there.
Part of the problem stems from workers dropping out of the labor force. If these "missing workers" were looking for work, Shierholz estimates the unemployment rate would be closer to 10% today, rather than its current 6.7%.
4. The poverty rate remains high: About 46.5 million Americans are living in poverty -- equivalent to 15% of the entire U.S. population. The poverty rate has barely budged during Obama's presidency, marking the first time it has remained at or above 15% for three consecutive years since 1965.
Delete5. Record number of Americans are on food stamps: Amid the recession, the food stamp rolls surged, and as of 2013, 48 million Americans were receiving the benefits -- the highest number since the program began in 1969.
The average recipient gets $133 a month from the program, but some of those benefits are now on the chopping block in Congress.
Share your story: Were you helped, or left behind by the recovery?
6. The manufacturing revival was a mirage: In his 2012 State of the Union address, the president spoke highly of manufacturers that were bringing jobs back to America. Specifically, he highlighted padlock-manufacturer Master Lock for returning 100 jobs to its Milwaukee factory.
Here's what he forgot to mention though: even after bringing a few jobs back to America, manufacturers like Master Lock are operating with a U.S. workforce that's a small fraction of the size it was two decades ago.
With automation playing a larger role, and many jobs remaining in cheaper overseas markets (like China and Mexico in Master Lock's case), the story of a manufacturing revival is "overwhelmingly imaginary," said Alan Tonelson, research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council.
Overall, manufacturers have added only 568,000 jobs since 2010, about a quarter of those cut in the prior two years.
7. Global trade isn't helping much: Remember when the president unveiled an ambitious goal to double U.S. exports over a five-year period, starting in 2010? With one year left to go, he's far from getting there.
U.S. exports to the rest of the world totaled $1.1 trillion in 2009, adjusted for inflation, and reached $1.4 trillion in 2012. They would need to have a gangbusters year, growing another 57%, to reach Obama's goal by the end of 2014.
"By any reasonable standards, this goal has flopped miserably," Tonelson said.
Plus, more exports mean little for economic growth unless they happen to grow faster than imports. After Obama signed a free trade agreement with South Korea in 2011, exports grew, but imports from the country -- like cell phones, cars and auto parts -- grew even faster.
"The president talks about trade and lifting exports, but ignores imports. That's like reporting the results of a football game by giving the score of just one of the teams. You don't know who won," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
EPI estimates the agreement resulted in the loss of 40,000 American jobs, as opposed to the 70,000 jobs the Obama administration said it would support.
4. The poverty rate remains high: About 46.5 million Americans are living in poverty -- equivalent to 15% of the entire U.S. population. The poverty rate has barely budged during Obama's presidency, marking the first time it has remained at or above 15% for three consecutive years since 1965.
ReplyDelete5. Record number of Americans are on food stamps: Amid the recession, the food stamp rolls surged, and as of 2013, 48 million Americans were receiving the benefits -- the highest number since the program began in 1969.
The average recipient gets $133 a month from the program, but some of those benefits are now on the chopping block in Congress.
Share your story: Were you helped, or left behind by the recovery?
6. The manufacturing revival was a mirage: In his 2012 State of the Union address, the president spoke highly of manufacturers that were bringing jobs back to America. Specifically, he highlighted padlock-manufacturer Master Lock for returning 100 jobs to its Milwaukee factory.
Here's what he forgot to mention though: even after bringing a few jobs back to America, manufacturers like Master Lock are operating with a U.S. workforce that's a small fraction of the size it was two decades ago.
With automation playing a larger role, and many jobs remaining in cheaper overseas markets (like China and Mexico in Master Lock's case), the story of a manufacturing revival is "overwhelmingly imaginary," said Alan Tonelson, research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council.
Overall, manufacturers have added only 568,000 jobs since 2010, about a quarter of those cut in the prior two years.
7. Global trade isn't helping much: Remember when the president unveiled an ambitious goal to double U.S. exports over a five-year period, starting in 2010? With one year left to go, he's far from getting there.
U.S. exports to the rest of the world totaled $1.1 trillion in 2009, adjusted for inflation, and reached $1.4 trillion in 2012. They would need to have a gangbusters year, growing another 57%, to reach Obama's goal by the end of 2014.
"By any reasonable standards, this goal has flopped miserably," Tonelson said.
Plus, more exports mean little for economic growth unless they happen to grow faster than imports. After Obama signed a free trade agreement with South Korea in 2011, exports grew, but imports from the country -- like cell phones, cars and auto parts -- grew even faster.
"The president talks about trade and lifting exports, but ignores imports. That's like reporting the results of a football game by giving the score of just one of the teams. You don't know who won," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
EPI estimates the agreement resulted in the loss of 40,000 American jobs, as opposed to the 70,000 jobs the Obama administration said it would support.
Three plus decades of conservative politics and conservative economic strategy has put this country in a place in which the once-ballyhooed middle class is struggling, as indicated by the CNN article above. The almost total economic collapse of the Great Recession was the worst of this, almost a final nail in the coffin of the middle class in this country. Since Obama's election, the conservative Republicans and their uber-rich puppetmasters have had one thing and one thing only on their mind: To obstruct the recovery, even if it costs the middle and working classes more misery.
ReplyDeleteIt has worked to some extent, though 9 million jobs is 9 million jobs, and hourly and weekly earnings, when adjusted for inflation, are now FINALLY back to what they were in the late 1970's, before the Reagan Recession. But the biggest triumph of the conservative Republicans, teabaggers, and their billionaire Koch supporters has been psychological: They have convinced a huge chunk of the American population that 1. The recovery should be much farther ahead. 2. That recovery programs are just giveaways to the lazy, 3. That Obama and the Dems are ineffectual (despite the progress under the most obscene obstruction this country has seen for decades), 4. That government is generally "bad", and 5., and worst of all: That Both Parties are the Same, that both parties care nothing about the people and are only corporate shills.
This last is the most dangerous, because it will keep people from getting involved in politics; it will keep people from coming to the polls, it will push people towards third party movements that do nothing other than peel off votes from the only party that can effect some real positive change in this country, and that is the Democratic party. Now are the Democrats perfect? Nope, not by a long shot.. But the fact is that they are NOT Republicans.