Friday, August 2, 2013

How bad is the jobs market? We currently have the same number of full time jobs as in April of 2005 but 20 million more people aged 16 and over

We're really getting close to having a lost decade.  We have the same number of full time jobs today as we did back in April of 2005, over 7 years ago, while in the interim our working age population has grown by 20 million!  That's millions of people who know have to work part time and essentially say good bye to any hopes of a career or savings.  Check out this chart of full time jobs:


Now compare that with a chart of part time jobs:


As you can see, part time jobs have hit an all time high while full time jobs have been languishing.  That is really a bad sign.  And as you can see from the chart below, historically they grew at pretty similar rates, it's only recently that we have seen such a massive bifurcation:


How can we expect our economy to grow when the only jobs people can get are part-time and usually don't involve actually manufacturing anything other than maybe a hamburger and fries?  We can't survive long term as just being a service economy, we've seen what happens with that.  We need real, full time jobs so people can have actual careers and actual futures.  We need to continue the de-unionization process, loosen the environmental statutes so companies can actually open manufacturing plants in this country again and reform our corporate tax system to get corporations to repatriate the billions upon billions of dollars they have parked overseas.

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