Felix Salmon | April’s jobs: Americans Aren’t Working

Posted on May 05 2012 – 7:00 PM – Posted by: Doug Brady

There’s a lot going on in this month’s jobs report. The headline number of jobs created — 115,000 — is miserable: it’s basically just enough to keep up with population growth. That’s the number the markets look at. The number the politicians look at, however, is the unemployment rate, which ticked down to 8.1%. That’s still high, but it’s not a statistic to beat Obama round the head with.

The big news, however, lies elsewhere, in the fact that a whopping 522,000 people left the labor force joined the “not in labor force” rolls last month. When more than half a million people in one month decide that they’re not even going to bother looking for work any more, there’s no way you can say you’re in a healthy recovery.

Zero Hedge has the two charts which matter. First you have the number of people not in the labor force, which has been climbing steadily through the recession and the recovery, and is now approaching 90 million. The only time it fell was during the first quarter of 2010 — the census-hiring boom. This chart speaks volumes to me: it says that while Capital might not be in a recession any more, Labor still isn’t working.

More.

Article source: http://conservatives4palin.com/2012/05/felix-salmon-aprils-jobs-americans-arent-working.html