By: Rachel Pulaski
In March, the number of Americans who dropped out of the labor force increased by 663,000 which adds up to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer looking for employment.
Zero Hedge reported:
This was the biggest monthly increase in people dropping out of the labor force since January 2012, when the BLS did its census recast of the labor numbers. And even worse, the labor force participation rate plunged from an already abysmal 63.5% to 63.3% – the lowest since 1979!But at least it helped with the now painfully grotesque propaganda that the US unemployment rate is “improving.”
In March, 312,000 women dropped out of the labor force bringing the total to 49 million.
WSJ is reporting the actual unemployment for youth under 25 may be as high as 22.9% :
Perhaps no group has been hit harder by the recession and grinding recovery than the young. The official unemployment rate for those under age 25 is 16.2% , more than double the rate for the population as a whole. In percentage terms, unemployment has fallen far more slowly for young people than for the wider population.
Those figures actually understate the severity of the problem, however. The government only considers people “unemployed” if they’re actively looking for work. People who stop looking—whether they’re retired, in school, raising a family or living on friends’ couches — are instead considered “not in the labor force,” even if they would prefer to work given the opportunity.
When the recession began in December, 2007, 59.2% of the under-25 population was in the labor force, meaning they were either working or looking for work. Today, that figure has fallen to 54.5% . That may not sound like a big drop, but it makes a huge difference. If the so-called participation rate had remained unchanged, there would be 1.8 million more young people in the labor force today than there actually are. Counting those people as unemployed, rather than out of the labor force, would push the unemployment rate up to 22.9% . That’s only a hair better than the 23.9% youth unemployment rate in the euro zone, and has shown only very modest improvement during the recovery.
The White House responded with a report stating this is all proof the economy ” is continuing to recover”.
