Ain't that The Truth: Obama Recession 2.0 "Why Everyone Should be Scared to Death of Recent Jobs Report"

Obama Recession 2.0

Why Everyone Should be Scared to Death of Recent Jobs Report

The news broke today that we have added 873,000 jobs and unemployment had dropped to 7.8%. Along with President Obama, the liberal media was quick to break open the champagne bottles. As with the Benghazi consulate attacks, don’t pay too much attention to the man behind the curtain because the devil is in the details.

THE DETAILS

There are two surveys taken to determine employment and unemployment. There’s the Establishment Non-Farm Payrolls report, which surveys businesses, and the DOL household survey, which surveys households, the latter of which is always more volatile and I will explain below. The Establishment Non-Farm Payrolls report showed that only 114,000 additional people found non-farm payroll jobs in September. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 260,000 payroll jobs are needed to keep up with population growth. This number alone makes September’s jobs report look very dismal. However, the DOL household survey showed the total employment level increasing by 873,000. This leaves a huge 756,000 job gap between the number of jobs employers told the Labor Department they created in September and the number of Americans who told the labor department that they got new jobs.

The DOL household survey also includes where the jobs come from. Of the 873,000 jobs reported by the DOL survey, 582,000 of them were part-time jobs. This is where the scary details lie. The BLS explains that, “The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” When was the last time we had such a huge spike in part-time employment? It was in the fall of 2008, right in the heart of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. In September 2008 we added 377,000 part-time jobs, in October 485,000, November 618,000 and December 2008 we added 666,000 part-time workers. As the chart below shows, history has proven that a large spike of part-time employment is an economic indicator of a deep recession:

What are even more striking are the high number of part-time jobs under President Obama and the lengthy period of time we have been at such high levels. During the last 25 years, President Reagan had an average 5.6 million part-time workers per year during his presidency, President GHW Bush had 5.7 million annually, President Clinton had 4.3 million annually, President GW Bush had 4.5 million annually and President Obama has maintained a whopping average 8.7 million part-time workers during his first 4 years! So while Barack Obama and the MSM dance around in the end-zone over the September jobs report, brace yourself because we could be at the beginning of Deep Recession 2.0!

Sources:

http://data.bls.gov/bls/employment.htm

http://data.bls.gov/bls/unemployment.htm

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12052/03-22-laborforceprojections.pdf