The problem is not the calculation, its the interpretation. Pride's point would have been made better by quoting the previous paragraph of the story: An economic development expert taught me a long time ago that the most important number on a jobs report is the total available work force, not the unemployment rate. If people leave the work force, the unemployment percentage drops, but that's misleading, because the uninformed believe that means jobs have been created.
This, you also have the people that have taken jobs not in their field, just to have employment. 4.4 million people have dropped out of the labor force since Obama took office. Jobs??
Look at your graph. It is obvious that the retirement of the Baby Boomers is affecting the curve. The bulge began in the late 1960's when the Boomers began to impact the workforce and now the decline has started. Much of the total available work force is retired and not coming back.
Smart enough to read a graph and understand the demographics. Look, when the baby boom joined the workforce, it cause the curve to go up more steeply than normal. Now that they are leaving the workforce, it has caused the curve to go down. More people are retiring than are joining the workforce.
Speaking of Boomers..... With the oldest of the Baby Boomers entering their mid-60's, many, around 75% will keep working. The biggest reasons they are giving... 36%-Poor Economy. 16%-Lack of Faith in SS and the Government. 15%-Change in employment situation. 13%-Can't afford to retire. 10%-Cost of living in retirement will be higher than expected. Source: Employee Benefit Research Institute.
In the three years that Obama has been president, the civilian population has grown by about 7.7 million people to 242,435,000.
Indeed. Much of the population are children or elderly and not a part of the work force. The ongoing retirement of the Baby Boomers will obviously swell this non-working element of the population. Look at the curve below, doesn't that dome-shaped swelling of the birth rate curve between 1945 and 1965 look remarkably like the dome-shaped swelling of the curve in the labor force curve above? And it falls right into the time frame that it should when the baby boom moved through the labor force. The correlation is clear.
