Labor Force

The Number Of Working Age Americans Without A Job Has Risen By Almost 10 Million Under Obama

January 12, 2014January 12, 2014 by Michael

That headline is not a misprint. The number of working age Americans that do not have a job has increased by nearly 10 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House. In January 2009, the number of “officially unemployed” workers plus the number of Americans “not in the labor force” was sitting at a grand total of 92.6 million. Today, that number has risen to 102.2 million. That means that the number of working age Americans that are not working has grown by close to 10 million since Barack Obama first took office. So why does the “official unemployment rate” keep going down? Well, it is because the federal government has been pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed workers have “left the labor force” over the past few years and do not want to work anymore. The government says that another 347,000 workers “left the labor force” in December. That is nearly five times larger than the 74,000 jobs that were “created” by the U.S. economy last month. And it is important to note that more than half of those jobs were temporary jobs, and it takes well over 100,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth each month. So the unemployment rate should not have gone down. If anything, it should have gone up.

In fact, if the federal government was using an honest labor force participation rate, the official unemployment rate would be far higher than it is right now. Instead of 6.7 percent, it would be 11.5 percent, and it has stayed at about that level since the end of the last recession.

But “6.7 percent” makes Obama look so much better than “11.5 percent”, don’t you think?

The labor force participation rate is now at a 35 year low, and the only way that the federal government has been able to get the “unemployment rate” to go down is by removing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of the labor force every month.

Why don’t they just get it over with and announce that they have decided that all workers immediately leave the labor force the moment that they lose their jobs? That way we could have an unemployment rate of “0.0 percent” and Obama could be hailed as a great economic savior.

Of course the truth is that the employment crisis in the United States is about as bad now as it was during the depths of the last recession.

If you want a much more accurate reading of the employment picture in America, just look at the employment-population ratio. The percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job continues to stagnate at an extremely low level. In fact, the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed between 58.2 percent and 58.8 percent for 52 months in a row…

Does that look like an “employment recovery” to you?

Because no matter how hard I squint my eyes, I just can’t see it.

The percentage of Americans that actually have jobs should have bounced back at least a little bit by now.

But it has not happened.

And guess what? Most people don’t know this, but the U.S. economy actually created fewer jobs in 2013 than it did in 2012. So the momentum of job creation is actually going the wrong way.

No matter how rosy the mainstream media makes things out to be, the reality on the ground tells an entirely different story.

For example, just check out the desperation that was displayed on the streets of New York City last week…

The line wrapped nearly around an entire city block on Friday as approximately 1,500 people waited in Queens for a chance to apply for a coveted union job as painters or blasters on bridges and steel structures.

The first few people on line had been there since 1 p.m. on Tuesday when the temperature in New York City was in the single digits.

The job that those desperate workers wanted to apply for only pays $17.20 an hour.

Of course that is far from an isolated incident. Last week, I wrote about how 1,600 workers recently applied for just 36 jobs at an ice cream plant in Maryland.

We would not be witnessing scenes like these if the unemployment rate in America was really just 6.7 percent.

An article by Phoenix Capital Research does a good job of summarizing how useless the official government numbers have become…

Since 2009, we’ve been told that things have improved. The fact of the matter is that the improvement has been largely due to accounting tricks rather than any real change in reality.

Sure you can make unemployment look better by not counting people, you can claim the economy is growing by ignoring inflation, you can argue that inflation is low because you don’t count food or energy, but the reality is that all of these arguments are grade “A” BS.

We are now five years into the “recovery.” The single and I mean SINGLE accomplishment from spending over $3 trillion has been the stock market going higher. This is a complete and total failure. Based on the business cycle alone, the economy should be roaring.

What does it say that we’ve spent this much money and accomplished so little?

The word is FAILURE.

The media is lying about the economy. They have been for years. Even the BLS now admits that its methodologies are either inefficient (read: DON’T work) or outright wrong.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there has not been an economic recovery in this nation.

Anyone that tries to tell you that is lying to you.

And now the next major wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching.

The U.S. national debt is on pace to more than double during the eight years of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve has been recklessly printing up trillions of dollars. The long-term damage that they have done to our economy is incalculable. But despite all of those extraordinary “stimulus” measures, the percentage of Americans that are actually working has not budged.

If we were going to have a recovery, it would have happened by this point. In fact, this is all the “recovery” that we are going to experience.

From here on out, this is about as good as things are going to get. As bad as you may think things are now, the truth is that this is rip-roaring prosperity compared to what is coming.

I hope that you are getting prepared.

The U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate Is At A 35 Year Low

October 22, 2013October 22, 2013 by Michael

The percentage of Americans that are participating in the labor force is the lowest that it has been in 35 years. During the 70s, 80s and 90s, the labor force participation rate consistently rose as large numbers of women entered the workforce. It peaked at 67.3 percent in early 2000, and just before the last recession it was sitting at about 66 percent. Since the start of the last recession, the labor force participation rate has not stopped falling and it is now at a 35 year low. In September, 11,255,000 Americans were considered to be “unemployed”, and an astounding 90,609,000 Americans were considered to be “not in the labor force”. The number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by more than 10 million since Barack Obama entered the White House. When you add the number of unemployed Americans to the number of Americans “not in the labor force”, you come up with a grand total of more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job.

The Obama administration and the mainstream media continue to insist that we are in the midst of an “economic recovery”, but that is a total joke. Does the chart posted below look like a recovery to you?…

Americans are leaving the labor force in droves. If the labor force participation rate was at the same level that it was when Obama first became president, the official unemployment rate would be up around 10 percent and everyone would be wondering when the “economic depression” would finally end.

It is funny how our perceptions of reality are so greatly shaped by what our televisions tell us to think.

Below I have posted a chart of the “inactivity rate” of U.S. men in the 25 to 54-year-old age group. As you can see, the percentage of men in their prime working years that are not employed and not considered to be unemployed either has been rising steadily…

We have millions upon millions of men just sitting around and doing essentially nothing. Not that women are doing so much better. In fact, the labor force participation rate for women is at a 24 year low.

Some people may be tempted to think that all of this is happening because more Americans are choosing to stay home and raise children. But that is not the case at all. In fact, in a previous article I showed that the marriage rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low and the birth rate for young women in this country is also at an all-time low.

People are not staying home because of family obligations. Rather, people are staying home because there aren’t enough jobs available.

And when Americans that are actually employed do lose their jobs, it is taking them a very, very long time to find another one. Just check out the following chart…

Once again, I must ask – does that look like a “recovery” to you?

Obama can say the word “recovery” as much as he would like, but that does not make it a reality.

So is anyone out there actually doing well?

Yes, as I have talked about frequently, some pockets of the country are doing quite nicely. In fact, government workers (think Washington D.C.) and finance workers (Wall Street, etc.) are tied for the lowest rates of unemployment in the nation (3.9 percent).

But for almost everyone else, things are very hard right now and poverty continues to grow.

Just today, I came across a recent study that discovered that nearly half of all public students in the United States come from low income homes.

That is an incredible number.

But this is just the beginning of our problems. Our debt continues to grow by leaps and bounds and our big banks are engaging in extraordinarily reckless behavior. As Richard Russell recently discussed, it is only a matter of time before this entire house of cards comes tumbling down…

In this whole process, debt has been created to an extent never seen before in history. So far, the debt has been managed with super-low interest rates and borrowing. But the compounding process goes on, and the debt mountain continues to grow. So, to be brief, I see the theme of today as the “haves” doing whatever they have to — to remain in power.

The dangers in the background for the haves are the possibilities that (1) interest rates will begin to advance, and (2) inflation will rise and be so visible that even the common man will recognize it, and begin to protest, or even revolt and (3) the whole debt structure will rise so high that it will topple over of its own weight and take down the entire world economy with it.

So as bad as things are today, the truth is that they are far, far better than what is eventually coming.

If you want to get a glimpse of the future of the U.S. economy, just check out what has happened to Greece…

Greeks are on average almost 40 percent poorer than they were in 2008, data indicated, laying bare the impact of a brutal recession and austerity measures the government may be forced to extend into next year.

Gross disposable incomes fell 29.5 percent between the second quarters of 2008 and 2013, statistics service ELSTAT said on Tuesday. Adding in cumulative consumer price inflation over the same period takes the decline close to 40 percent.

As you can see from the charts posted above, our economy has never even come close to getting back to the level that we were at before the last financial crisis.

And now the next wave of the economic collapse is approaching.

Right now, Spain has an unemployment rate that is above 26 percent and Greece has an unemployment rate that is above 27 percent.

We will eventually be heading up toward those levels.

As millions of good paying jobs continue to be shipped overseas, and as technology continues to eliminate millions of our jobs, the unemployment situation in this country will continue to grow even worse.

And whenever the next great financial crisis inevitably strikes, that will greatly accelerate our employment problems.

If you can move toward becoming more independent of the “system”, now would be a good time to do so. The job that you have today may not be there next month or next year.

We are moving into the greatest period of economic instability in U.S. history.

Get ready for it while you still can.

Shocking Numbers That Show The Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment In America

February 1, 2013 by Michael

Did you know that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Did you know that the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House was more than three times greater than the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during the entire decade of the 1980s? The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January. Based on that news, the Dow broke the 14,000 barrier for the first time since October 2007. But if you actually look at the “non-seasonally adjusted” numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January. But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January. It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin. Back in 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed. Today, only 141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then. When the government and the media tell you that we are in a “recovery” and that unemployment is lower than it was a couple of years ago, I encourage you to dig deeper. The truth is that even the government’s own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession. The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy. After you see the numbers that I have compiled in this article, I think that you will agree with me.

First of all, let’s take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years. These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you can see, this is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006…

2006: 63.1

2007: 63.0

2008: 62.2

2009: 59.3

2010: 58.5

2011: 58.4

In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.

Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend?

Even a 2nd grader could answer that question.

So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a “recovery”?

But most Americans believe what they are told. It is almost as if we are in some kind of a “matrix” where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.

The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the “not in the labor force” category.

Just check out how the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years…

2006: 77,387,000

2007: 78,743,000

2008: 79,501,000

2009: 81,659,000

2010: 83,941,000

2011: 86,001,000

In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force.

That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only increased by 2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.

You sure can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer. The truth is that if the labor force participation rate was at the same level it was at when Barack Obama was first elected, the official unemployment rate would be well above 10 percent.

But that wouldn’t do at all, would it? 7.9 percent sounds so much nicer.

And of course even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are doing okay.

If you can believe it, in America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less.

To me, that is a mind blowing statistic. It would be incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family.

If you live in Washington D.C. or New York City and you have a “good job” working for the establishment, you may not realize it, but there are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs.

For much more on the “working poor” in the United States, please see my previous article entitled “35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind“.

If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappear and poverty in America will continue to explode.

In a previous article, I noted that during Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

How bad do things have to get before people realize that we are living through a nightmare?

Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system.

Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.

Most Americans will gather around their television sets this weekend and watch the Super Bowl and laugh at all the funny commercials without even thinking about how America is literally falling apart all around them.

But there is one group of Americans that is acutely aware of how bad things have really gotten. Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine of job growth in this country, but right now small business owners all over the nation are facing a tremendous crisis.

Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations.

A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of all small business owners in America are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare”, and that an astounding 30 percent of all small business owners in America are not hiring and fear that they will go out of business within the next 12 months.

In a previous article entitled “We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America“, I detailed how small businesses in America are being systematically wiped out. Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline.

According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

Is that a good trend or a bad trend?

All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this. They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.

It is almost as if we didn’t learn any lessons from 2008.

Even while household spending in Europe has moderated, household spending in the United States continues to soar. Just check out the chart in this article.

And guess what? The infamous “no money down mortgages” are back. If we wait long enough, perhaps “interest only mortgages” will make a comeback as well.

Unfortunately, I am afraid that time is running out. we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts.

2008 was just a “hiccup” compared to what is coming. Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching.

I hope that you are getting prepared. Back in 2008, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, and because many of them did not have any savings, many of them suddenly lost their homes. One of the most important things that you can do to prepare for the coming crisis is to build up an emergency fund. If things suddenly go bad, you don’t want to lose your house and everything that you have always worked for.

In addition, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing. The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.

So what are all of you seeing in your own areas?

Are businesses shutting down?

Are people having a hard time finding good jobs?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

Unemployment Is Not Going Down: The Employment Rate Has Been Under 59 Percent For 39 Months In A Row

December 8, 2012December 9, 2012 by Michael

The mainstream media is heralding the decline of the official unemployment rate to 7.7 percent as evidence that the U.S. economy is improving. But it is a giant lie. The truth is that unemployment in America is not actually going down. The percentage of working age Americans with a job actually dropped slightly in November. During the last recession, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to under 59 percent and it has stayed there for 39 months in a row. In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place! So how in the world are they able to pretend that the “unemployment rate” is going down steadily? Well, they get there by pretending that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers “leave the labor force” each month. According to the government, another 350,000 Americans left the labor force during November, and when you keep pretending that huge chunks of workers “disappear” each month it is easy to get the “unemployment rate” to go down. But any idiot can see that there is something really funny about these numbers. Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million. At this point the official unemployment rate is so manipulated that it is of very little value at all.

But the mainstream media is just eating up this “good news”. They are very excited that the “unemployment rate” has fallen from its peak of 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 7.7 percent now…

But if unemployment was actually going down, we should be seeing the percentage of Americans with a job go up.

Unfortunately, that is NOT happening.

As I mentioned above, the “employment rate” fell below 59 percent during the last economic crisis and it has stayed there for 39 consecutive months…

So all of that stuff about the employment situation getting better is just a load of nonsense. The percentage of Americans with a job has stayed very, very steady since the end of 2009. It is almost as if someone has hit a “pause button” and won’t let unemployment get better or get worse.

This is the first time since the end of World War II that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back in a significant way after a recession has ended.

To me, that is a very bad sign.

I also find it very interesting that the government revised the “job gains” for September and October downward in this recent report…

The government revised down job gains for September and October by a total 49,000. September’s additions were revised from 148,000 to 132,000 and October’s, from 171,000 to 138,000.

So it turns out that the glowing employment reports from those months that helped get Obama re-elected were really not that great after all.

The truth is that it takes somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population. So at best we are treading water.

And who is “creating” those new jobs?

According to an analysis performed by CNSNews.com, 73 percent of the jobs “created” over the past 5 months have been “created” by government.

But government does not create real wealth.

Real wealth is only created by the private sector.

It would be very nice if I could report a major employment turnaround, but it simply is not happening.

Instead, we continue to see an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty.

If things are getting better, then why are organizations like the Salvation Army seeing record numbers of families coming to them for help this holiday season?

For much more on the continued growth of poverty in the United States, just see this article.

Sadly, an increasing number of Americans find themselves forced to turn to the government for assistance, and the cost of caring for all of them has become extremely expensive…

According to the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, welfare spending per day per household in poverty is $168, which is higher than the $137 median income per day. When broken down per hour, welfare spending per hour per household in poverty is $30.60, which is higher than the $25.03 median income per hour.

But if you think that things are bad now, you should brace yourself, because things are going to get even worse.

For example, how much worse will things get if a fiscal cliff deal is not reached and millions more Americans find themselves in desperate need of help? According to ABC News, more than 3 million Americans will lose unemployment benefits by the beginning of April if Congress does not do something…

Millions of unemployed Americans have another reason to worry about “fiscal cliff” budget talks that seek to avoid looming tax increases and dire spending cuts come January.

About 2.1 million people will stop receiving jobless benefits immediately if Congress doesn’t reauthorize federal unemployment insurance programs by year’s end. Another 1 million will lose benefits over the first three months of 2013.

2013 is already shaping up to be a very tough year.

But the mainstream media is not really talking about how the middle class is systematically being destroyed or about how our once great manufacturing cities are being turned into desolate wastelands.

They just want us all to be happy, but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy no longer produces enough jobs for everybody and it never will again.

Both of our major political parties have fully embraced the emerging one world economic system which puts average American workers into direct competition for jobs with workers in third world countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

Millions of good paying American jobs have been shipped to countries where workers work very long hours in absolutely horrific conditions for as little as 45 dollars a month.

Are you willing to work for 45 dollars a month?

Meanwhile, Americans that still do have jobs are piling up more debt than ever before. It appears that most people have not learned any lessons from the last major economic crisis. It has just been reported that consumer borrowing in the United States has hit a new record high…

Americans swiped their credit cards more often in October and borrowed more to attend school and buy cars. The increases drove U.S. consumer debt to an all-time high.

The Federal Reserve said Friday that consumers increased their borrowing by $14.2 billion in October from September. Total borrowing rose to a record $2.75 trillion.

Isn’t that lovely?

And of course the biggest offender of all is our federal government. They just keep borrowing money as if there was no tomorrow.

During the first two months of fiscal year 2013, the U.S. government has run a deficit of $292 billion dollars ($57 billion worse than last year) and during that time it has borrowed an average of $4.8 billion dollars a day.

30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about 1.1 trillion dollars.

Now it is more than 16.3 trillion dollars.

To get an idea how much money 16 trillion dollars is, just watch this 2 minute video.

How could we be so stupid?

Yes, much of America is still experiencing “prosperity” right now. But it is a prosperity that has been fueled by the greatest debt bubble that the world has ever seen.

When that debt bubble bursts the pain is going to be unbelievable.

If you actually believe that America is going to prosper in the years to come, you are just fooling yourself.

Our economy is declining and has been declining for quite some time. If you doubt this, just read this: “34 Signs That America Is In Decline“.

So that is the bad news.

But the good news is that even though the entire nation is not going to prosper, there will be those that will have prepared and that will have gotten themselves into position to take advantage of what is coming. During the coming crisis a massive amount of money and wealth will change hands. Instead of living in fear and cowering under a blanket, now is the time to figure out how you and your family can thrive during the hard times that are on the horizon.

During the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, there were some people that actually did amazingly well. So don’t lose hope just because the U.S. economy is headed for disaster.

Everything that can be shaken will be shaken. But if you understand what is happening and you prepare for it, the times that are coming can actually be a great adventure and a great blessing for you and your family.

But if you just stick your head in the sand and have blind faith in the system and pretend that everything is going to be okay somehow, then you will be blindsided by the coming crisis and you will only have yourself to blame.

The Real Unemployment Numbers Are Worse Than You Are Being Told

September 7, 2012September 9, 2012 by Michael

According to the Obama administration, the unemployment rate in the United States has been slowly coming down over the past couple of years. But is that actually true? When you take a closer look at the data you quickly realize that the real unemployment numbers are much worse than we are being told. For example, if the labor force participation rate was the same today as it was back when Barack Obama first took office, the unemployment rate in the United States would be a whopping 11.2 percent. But every month the Obama administration has been able to show “progress” because of the fiction that hundreds of thousands of Americans are “disappearing” from the labor force each month. Frankly, the way that they come up with these numbers is an insult to our intelligence. Personally, I much prefer the employment-population ratio. It is a measure of the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs. I like to call it “the employment rate”. So what happened to the “employment rate” in August? It fell slightly to 58.3 percent. It is lower than it was when the last recession supposedly ended, and it is almost as low as it has been at any point since the very beginning of this crisis. A few times during this economic downturn it has actually hit 58.2 percent. Needless to say, things are not getting any better. So why aren’t the American people being told the truth?

After every other recession in the post-World War II era, the employment rate has always rebounded.

But not this time.

Does this look like a recovery to you?….

So how in the world can Barack Obama claim that we are better off now?

In August 2010, 58.5 percent of working age Americans had jobs.

In August 2012, 58.3 percent of working age Americans had jobs.

So where is the recovery?

It is two years later and a smaller percentage of Americans are employed.

It is very frustrating to me that we are not being told the truth about the unemployment numbers. The following are some more indications that the real unemployment numbers are much worse than we are being told….

-In July, 142,220,000 Americans were working. In August, only 142,101,000 Americans were working. So the number of Americans working fell by 119,000 and yet the government would have us believe that the unemployment rate actually declined from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent.

-According to the federal government, 96,000 jobs were added to the economy in August and the U.S. labor force shrank by 368,000 even though our population is continually growing. If the size of the U.S. labor force had stayed the same, the official unemployment rate would have actually gone up to 8.4 percent.

-Almost all of the new jobs added in August were the result of the “birth-death” model used by the Labor Department to estimate jobs added by new businesses. That model has been heavily criticized for being inaccurate. If you take the 87,000 jobs added by that model out of the equation, then the U.S. economy only added 9,000 jobs in August. But it takes somewhere around 125,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with the growth of the population.

-If the labor participation rate was sitting where it was when Barack Obama first took office, the unemployment rate in the United States would actually be 11.2 percent.

-If the labor participation rate was sitting at the 30 year average of 65.8 percent, the unemployment rate in the United States would actually be 11.7 percent.

-John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics would put the “real” rate of unemployment up around 23 percent after adding in all workers that have given up looking for work and all underemployed workers.

-The labor participation rate for men has fallen to 69.9 percent. This is the lowest level that it has been since the U.S. government began tracking this statistic back in 1948.

-There was more bad news for manufacturing in this latest report. During the month of August the U.S. manufacturing sector lost approximately 15,000 jobs.

-The official unemployment rate has now been above 8 percent for 43 months in a row.

-The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been below 59 percent for 36 months in a row.

-The employment numbers for both June and July were revised downward significantly. For June, it turns out that only 45,000 jobs were added to the economy as opposed to the 64,000 that were originally reported. For July, it turns out that only 141,000 jobs were added to the economy as opposed to the 163,000 that were originally reported.

-Incredibly, 58 percent of the jobs created since the end of the last recession have been low income jobs.

-The U.S. economy currently has 4.7 million less jobs than it did when the last recession started.

So what is the solution to these problems?

The media is breathlessly proclaiming that more quantitative easing is on the way and that the Federal Reserve will save the economy and send the stock market soaring to new heights.

A headline on CNBC on Friday boldly declared the following: “Market Sees ‘Helicopter Ben’ Coming to the Rescue“.

You can almost hear the chopper blades whirling now.

Apparently Bernanke has had a love of showering the economy with money for a very long time. For example, you can see a picture of a young Ben Bernanke in action right here.

Of course that is a joke, but you get the point.

In recent years Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the rest of his cohorts have printed money like there is no tomorrow.

So have the previous rounds of quantitative easing solved our problems?

Of course not.

The employment rate is even lower today than it was two years ago.

But all of that money printing has sent the stock market soaring and it has enabled the big Wall Street banks to make an obscene amount of money.

The truth is that the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration and the big Wall Street banks don’t really care about you.

They don’t really care that the middle class is rapidly shrinking and that the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by more than 14 million since Barack Obama became president.

What they care about is what is good for them.

As I have written about previously, if we continue on the same path that we have been on for the past several decades, there will never be enough jobs in America ever again.

On our current trajectory, we will end up just like Greece where the unemployment rate is now up to 24.4 percent.

Once upon a time the economy of Greece was thriving.

But today, many formerly middle class Greek citizens are leaving Greece and are picking up whatever work they can find….

As a pharmaceutical salesman in Greece for 17 years, Tilemachos Karachalios wore a suit, drove a company car and had an expense account. He now mops schools in Sweden, forced from his home by Greece’s economic crisis.

“It was a very good job,” said Karachalios, 40, of his former life. “Now I clean Swedish s—.”

Karachalios, who left behind his 6-year-old daughter to be raised by his parents, is one of thousands fleeing Greece’s record 24 percent unemployment and austerity measures that threaten to undermine growth.

Would you be willing to do that?

Don’t laugh.

Someday when the unemployment rate in the United States gets that high we will see large numbers of desperate Americans leaving this country in search of work somewhere else.

Already, an increasing number of Americans are buying expired food at auctions.

Times are hard and people are trying to get by any way that they can.

More than 100 million Americans are already on welfare and things have not even gotten that bad yet.

This is nothing compared to what is coming.

As you can see from the chart posted near the top of this article, the last economic downturn appears to have permanently weakened the U.S. economy.

Now the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching.

How much worse will things get when it finally hits us?

That is something to think about.

The Shocking Truth About Unemployment In America In One Chart

April 9, 2012April 9, 2012 by Michael

The mainstream media is not telling you the truth about unemployment in the United States. The percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing. In March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job. In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job. So if the employment rate is exactly the same as it was two years ago, then how in the world can the Obama administration claim that things have gotten significantly better since then? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate in the United States was 9.8 percent in March 2010 and it declined to 8.2 percent in March 2012. So how is this possible if the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs hasn’t moved? Well, what they do is they claim that there are millions upon millions of Americans that have “left the labor force”. In other words, they claim that there are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans that don’t want jobs anymore. Of course that is a total farce, but the mainstream media and most Americans are buying it. They actually believe that the unemployment rate is going down. But the truth is that the unemployment crisis in America has not subsided. In fact, we are pretty much exactly where we were two years ago, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.

If you want to know the shocking truth about unemployment in America, all you need to do is to look at one chart. The chart posted below shows the change in the employment-population ratio over the past few years. What the employment-population ratio measures is the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs. As you can see, it fell dramatically during 2008 and 2009, and since then it has been hovering between 58 and 59 percent….

So there has been no employment recovery, and this is very odd because the employment-population ratio always bounces back after a recession.

The chart posted below shows how the employment-population ratio has changed since the late 1940s. The shaded areas represent recessions. Please take note that after every single recession (other than the current one) the employment-population ratio has always bounced back substantially.

During the most recent recession, the employment-population ratio fell farther than it had during any other recession in the post-World War II era.

If these were normal economic times, it would have been reasonable to expect a huge surge in hiring by now.

But we have not seen that.

Instead, the employment rate in the United States has been remarkably flat for more than two years.

So Barack Obama should not even begin to say anything at all about a “recovery” until the employment rate at least breaks the 59 percent barrier.

In the past I have written about how fraudulent the employment statistics put out by the federal government are.

Well, fortunately there are some folks up on Capitol Hill that are starting to take notice of this phenomenon as well. There is a new bill in Congress that would change the way that the unemployment rate is calculated….

A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims.

Of course there is probably not a chance that such a bill would ever get through the Senate, but at least some lawmakers are trying to get people to notice what is going on.

The sad truth of the matter is that the employment crisis in America is still about as bad as it was a couple of years ago.

Do you remember a couple of months ago when Barack Obama spoke with the wife of an unemployed engineer and asked her to send his resume to the White House?

Well, it turns out that the unemployed engineer still doesn’t have a job….

More than two months after President Barack Obama asked for Darin Wedel’s résumé, the phone is quiet, e-mails are no longer flooding in and the long-sought-after job interviews — which had begun to be scheduled — have petered out.

“Not even recruiting companies are calling anymore,” said Jennifer Wedel, the Fort Worth mother of two who chatted online this year with Obama about her out-of-work husband.

She says his job search has been hurt by a program to hire skilled foreign workers.

But Barack Obama is doing the same thing on a national level.

He is promising all of us that things are improving and that there will be lots of jobs for everyone soon, but it is all a lie.

The truth is that this period of relative stability that has been purchased by unprecedented levels of government debt will soon give way to even more economic trouble.

One of my readers recently brought to my attention a list of some of the major companies that are currently getting rid of workers….

Ford will be laying off 1,200 assembly line workers later on this month.

Pittsburgh-based paint and coating manufacturer PPG has announced that it will be laying off 2,000 workers.

J.C. Penney recently laid off 600 workers and has plans to lay off another 300 workers in July.

Lockheed Martin has announced that it will be laying off hundreds of workers.

Dow Chemical has announced that hundreds of workers are going to be laid off.

Yahoo has formally announced that it will be getting rid of about 2,000 workers.

Sony has announced plans to eliminate 10,000 jobs globally.

Even Oprah Winfrey is laying off workers. Oprah is reducing the size of the staff at the OWN network by 20 percent.

Meanwhile, our economy continues to bleed jobs at an astounding pace. At a time when American workers desperately need jobs, millions of them continue to be sent overseas.

In fact, even some jobs that you would think would be impossible to outsource are being given to foreigners. Just recently, ABC News did a major report on all of the roads and bridges all over the United States that are being built by Chinese companies. If you have not seen that report yet, you can view it online right here.

If you go into a Wal-Mart or a dollar store and you start turning over products you will find that huge numbers of them are made in China and that very few of them are made in the United States. China is absolutely dominating us on the global economic stage. Last year our trade deficit with China was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world. Yet we continue to pursue the exact same trade policies year after year.

So how is the American economy ever supposed to recover if we continue to play to lose?

As a nation we spend far more than we make, we consume far more than we produce and our federal government implements thousands of new business-crippling regulations every single year.

If you still have a good job, you should treasure it and you should try to hold on to it for as long as you can. Soon the next major economic downturn will be upon us and millions more Americans will lose their jobs and their homes.

Things did not have to turn out this way, but we made horribly bad decisions for decades and now the consequences are catching up with us.

You better get ready.