Payroll employment edges up by 103,000 in March; unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1%

[progree]

28. Lot's of great anecdotal stuff

Last edited Fri Apr 6, 2018, 01:58 PM - Edit history (2)

13. That 4% unemployment is BS There was 4% unemployment as W took over from Clinton and jobs were everywhere. If you got an interview you were almost guaranteed a job offer. And the pay was better, especially middle management.

Any data on the "pay is better, especially middle managerment". I haven't found any data that says wages and salaries are down, even on an inflation-adjusted basis, compared to 2000.

But today, so many people have given up looking for a job that 95,500 million people are not attached to the economy

Sounds like Trump on the campaign trail talking about "94 million jobless Americans" (or whatever it was at the time). Turns out, of these, only 5.3% say they want a job.

Not in Labor Force: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15000000

Not in Labor Force, Wants Job: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15026639

and our employment numbers include part time workers

True. They always have.

Yes, the official unemployment rate, U-3, counts only people who have looked for work in the past 4 weeks. And, as you say, they count part-time workers as employed. They've been counting it that way since 1948.

Most part-time workers don't want full-time jobs, BTW.

Part-Time Workers who want Full-Time Jobs (Table A-8's Part-Time For Economic Reasons) http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12032194
. March 2018: 5,019,000

Part-Time Workers (Table A-9) http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12600000
. March 2018: 27,858,000

But yes, 5 million is still a lot of part-time people wanting full time work

A broader measure of unemployment, U-6, counts part-time workers who say they want full-time work as unemployed. They count jobless (and part-time people who want full-time work are jobless in this statistic) people who have looked for work in the past year, and say they want a job in U-6. It's 8.0%, down from 8.8% a year ago.

The downside of the statistic is that they don't count people who haven't looked for work in the past 12 months.

U-6 unemployment rate http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709

Trump lies about everything and encourages his executive offices to lie. But we are supposed to believe that the BLS has not been corrupted and their numbers are accurate.

And produced a job report showing only 103,000 jobs gained in March, and a tiny 53,000 more than the last month's jobs reports when the 50,000 combined downward revisions of January and February are factored in.

But seriously, yes, we are all worried about it and wondering. Just not hearing or seeing any evidence yet (unlike some other departments like the EPA that scrub any mention of global warming / climate change and put out garbage about how uncertain the data is -- and how can we trust those pinheads in academia and left-wing government bureaucracies like NASA and NOAA, blah blah)

Even under W, we were in an official recession a year before they admitted it.

Hmm, I'll have to Google that. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the official determiners of when recessions and expansions occurs, does seem to take a long long time to do their work, to pinpoint the exact month it began. I haven't looked up any historic information about how long it's taken them to call previous recessions -- maybe you can help us with that. That said, who cares -- we all know the economy is contracting when there are net job losses month after month and the quarterly GDP reports show declining GDP. The unofficial but widely used definition of recession is two quarters in a row of negative GDP growth.