Time to play offense on the shrinking workforce

When is someone on the right going to expose the bogus employment and new job creation statistics being bandied around by almost everyone on the left? Usually, the media lets Obama and his minions drone on about the U3 unemployment rate of 4.9% or so and the number of “new jobs” created each month over the past seven years under Obama. Occasionally, a conservative media pundit will call them on the fact that there are many folks who have given up trying to find a decent job and have left the workforce and that many of those “new jobs” are low-wage and part-time jobs. But even that kind of correct reporting on the uncounted long-term unemployed (without work for over 27 weeks) and the “new non-farm private sector job creation” doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. The only statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that really matters, and that which captures the true state of employment and the economic deterioration in this country under Obama, is the so-called “Workforce Participation Rate.”

I pulled data from the year 2000, when Bush was elected, until now, and here’s the real “inconvenient truth.” It shows that the workforce participation rate was about 67% when Bush took over and is about 63% today. There are about 150 million people employed in the U.S. today, so a 4% deterioration in the workforce participation rate in eight years under Obama equates to about 6 million able-bodied and formerly employed citizens not working and not contributing to the GDP. Think about that – six million people! Most of whom are not minimum wage-type workers. No wonder Obama’s deficit spending and quantitative easing, which added $9 trillion to the national debt since 2008, have produced only a paltry growth in nominal GDP from $14.58 trillion per year in 2008 to $16.51 trillion today, an increase of $1.93 trillion. This equates to an average annual GDP increase of only about 1.4%. When will the RNC wake up and start beating this drum?