Originally posted by: ntdz
Liberals have been saying that for years, and we now have a nice economy with unemployment belew 5%.
The link below references someone else's opinion on the state of our economy. I looked for the statistics he quoted (from the BLS), but was not able to find it. Here are few selected quotes. My comments are in italics. The date of the article is 2/11/06.
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By Paul Craig Roberts
Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don?t know what worry is.
Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth.
I've read that elsewhere too. This is one of the reasons I think that official unemployment statitics is bogus. It is virtually impossible to have slower increase in jobs than population growth and the unemployemt rate to decrease. So obviously a lot of the unemployed are not counted.
Over the past five years the US economy experienced a net job loss in goods producing activities. The entire job growth was in service-providing activities?primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.
US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board.
Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.
The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is "the envy of the world."
Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.
The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized "new economy" never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.
I think the author is being more pessimistic here than necessary. The period he describes includes the .com bust with the associated huge losses in information sector jobs. I need the year-by-year numbers to decide how important the 2000-2002 period was.
In five years the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years.
No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year?s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau?s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camelot writes that there were 7.9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)
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If this is true (I could not confirm the statistics quoted above), our economy is FAR from being healthy, and true unemployment is certainly not below 5%. I personally have seen 25% increase in my salary over the last few years (I work in R&D) and I can't really complain.
Link to full article
If you click on the link to
MBG Information Services, there are some more scary statistics for 2005 there:
Three-fourths of industries suffered worsening balances with deficits in advanced tech goods again larger than all intellectual property surpluses. The auto sector set a new record -$139 billion with auto parts' deficits worsening by -20%.
Q4 Productivity & salaries down: Non-farm productivity fell at an annual rate of -0.6% in Q4 and compensation fell -0.4%. Most imporant, the 4 yrs of this recovery saw the weakest gain in non-farm output and hours worked ever recorded during similar periods. Indeed, total hours worked in '05-Q4 is -1.9% LESS than in '00-Q3 and is, by far, the worst such decline on record.
Compensation fell in 2005: Price-adjusted wages and salaries per hour for all US workers fell another -0.8% in 2005 to levels of mid-2001. Even with soaring costs for health care and other employer-paid benefits, total real compensation per hour fell by -0.3% in 2005, the first decline for compensation in 9 years.
An end to the illusion? The BEA estimates GDP grew at only 1.1% rate in Q4. Even with consumer spending almost stagnant, households again outspent their current disposable incomes producing the first annual dis-savings rate since 1933. Weakening consumer, business and government spending, together with an inventory buildup, a worsening trade deficit and continuing household dis-savings, points to severe economic stresses ahead.
Wages buy less than 4 yrs ago: The purchasing power of weekly wages rebounded by 0.1% in Dec. due to a drop in prices. But
weekly wages were down in 2005 for the 3rd straight year and are now below levels of Nov. '01 when the current recovery started. Wage data cover 82% of the private sector workforce, 92 million jobs.
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