The U.S. unemployment rate is down, but rising numbers of Americans have dropped out of the labor force entirely

In case there are some people here who do not understand how the unemployment rate can be slightly improving when in fact more people are NOT working.

----A big puzzle looms over the U.S. economy: Friday's jobs report tells us that the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7% from a peak of 10% at the height of the Great Recession. But at the same time, only 63.2% of Americans 16 or older are participating in the labor force, which, while up a bit in March, is down substantially since 2000. As recently as the late 1990s, the U.S. was a nation in which employment, job creation and labor force participation went hand in hand. That is no longer the case.



The unemployment rate, the figure that dominates reporting on the economy, is the fraction of the labor force (those working or seeking work) that is unemployed. This rate has declined slowly since the end of the Great Recession. What hasn't recovered over that same period is the labor force participation rate, which today stands roughly where it did in 1977

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People are not working. be it lack of job creation or for what ever reason, people are not working. its probably because they really don't have to and they can just hang out and do art now.

....and this is what the COWH doesn't get. Until the jobs and the pay return for the portion of the workforce that has been disenfranchised, the recovery is NOT ever going to happen in a meaningful way. I don't care how many PT jobs get created, those PT jobs don't pay the same in benefits, retirement, and real wages that move the economy. One of the factors is the ACA creating a disincentive to work. People aren't running out and starting businesses based on the fact that because health insurance is no longer tied to work, they aren't tied to those jobs and they can follow some sort of liberal BS dream in the self-employed ranks. Businesses aren't hiring because we just heard the other day that the ACA adds 5k per worker in additional costs beyond what is already required to create a job. All the idiots in the WH are doing is spoon feeding their voting blocks with exemptions from the ACA while roasting the middle class in additional taxes. 65 months of continual failure and the sad thing is that we still have many more months to go before we try something else.

PACEDOG#1 wrote:....and this is what the COWH doesn't get. Until the jobs and the pay return for the portion of the workforce that has been disenfranchised, the recovery is NOT ever going to happen in a meaningful way. I don't care how many PT jobs get created, those PT jobs don't pay the same in benefits, retirement, and real wages that move the economy. One of the factors is the ACA creating a disincentive to work. People aren't running out and starting businesses based on the fact that because health insurance is no longer tied to work, they aren't tied to those jobs and they can follow some sort of liberal BS dream in the self-employed ranks. Businesses aren't hiring because we just heard the other day that the ACA adds 5k per worker in additional costs beyond what is already required to create a job. All the idiots in the WH are doing is spoon feeding their voting blocks with exemptions from the ACA while roasting the middle class in additional taxes. 65 months of continual failure and the sad thing is that we still have many more months to go before we try something else.

yep, I am being roasted for sure along with many middle class workers.

When you have almost half of the country not paying into the pot that provides all these social services, sooner or later it runs out. But only after death of our entire system.

We have a cultural problem in this country that has been exacerbated by the leftist ideology of let gov. Politicians have been playing off and selling us out for a long time. The days of abusing the tax payers are soon to end because we will all be broke, except the elite. But they will be too when we fall. They do not understand our symbiosis. but they will when the QE lie ends.