Much ado is being made of the fact that unemployment claims are at a two month low. Biden will most assuredly make a big deal out of it. That number means little. What matters is the labor force participation rate. For July, that stands at 62.1 percent.

Back at the turn of the millennium, 66 percent of Americans were working. That number dropped during Obama’s Presidency, all the way to 62.8 percent by December of 2016.

Then Trump took over. By February of 2020, it had regained a quarter of what was lost and rebounded to 63.4. The left couldn’t have that, so enter the COVID shutdown. Now Biden is rejoicing as the labor force participation rate hovers at a level that is even less than Obama’s low.

Categories: economicsThe Collapse

6 Comments

Matthew · September 2, 2022 at 7:27 am

There are absolutely way too many people in the wagon and far too few of us pulling it. Every day, with everything that they do, the left is shifting, cajoling and shoving more and more people into the wagon. Not that there shouldn’t be some folks in the wagon, there is plenty of room for those that belong there, and everyone knows who they are. The problem is that the left does not care about the ones that belong, those people can’t do anything for them. They’re putting criminals, drug addicts, ne’er do wells, illegal aliens, entire foreign countries it seems and now they’ve crammed in those that borrowed themselves silly for 4 years (or more) so they could party and be further indoctrinated into the hive. All of us pulling know that most of the people in the wagon shouldn’t be. The left knows, and I dare say most of the people in the wagon know they should be out here with us pulling instead of riding along happily screaming at us to pull harder and do our fair share. We need save those that need saving, with our own wagon, and tell the left to take theirs and try pulling it themselves. Preferably far away.

mike · September 2, 2022 at 8:31 am

I don’t think they will be rejoicing for very long. Even assuming there is no near term collapse of other political upheaval, the wealth confiscation screws they are tightening in the face of high inflation and high gas prices will shatter any remaining illusion of upward mobility for the middle class. Simply put, it will not make monetary sense to fill your tank up and go work for X amount of income if what is left over after massive taxes is not enough to make ends meet. Cutting back to just the essentials and trying to carry on in the workforce probably means driving a beater car, selling the McMansion and downsizing to a crackerbox house, and so on. Most normies will try this for a while, but will probably fail to downsize before they are forclosed.
The overpaid pretend work white collar jobs that most upwardly mobile Americans have grown accustomed to since the 1950’s are going to go away anyway. Businesses, like individuals and households, are going to have to cut out the useless extravagances, and what most people do for “work” in the corporate world today amounts to useless electronic paper shuffling and opining about policy trivia in business meetings.
The low end of the working world will not be much better off. For example, I don’t think people in the food service industry for one will be keeping those jobs. The wipeout of the white collar types will reduce eating out to a trickle on the one hand, and the tax police auditing every waiter and waitress in the country for unreported tip income will clinch it. Why would anyone spend 40 or more hours a week working, only to just barely break even. All the while, our domestic welfare leisure class will be sitting at home being paid and fed and they are being joined by millions of new foreign looters as I write this.
Along with everything else the Left has managed to break recently, I think they have finally had their own way enough to ensure that there will shortly be more people sitting in the wagon rather than pulling it. When that tipping point is reached, the wagon will just stop. The 87,000 Tax Gestapo agents are going to have a smaller pool of productive people to go after by the day. The lucky ones will get assigned to track down former taxpayers in the slums and Bidenville homeless camps to audit. The unlucky agents will be getting the much less healthy enforcement assignments on people who have been waiting for them for a long time.

mike · September 2, 2022 at 8:31 am

I don’t think they will be rejoicing for very long. Even assuming there is no near term collapse of other political upheaval, the wealth confiscation screws they are tightening in the face of high inflation and high gas prices will shatter any remaining illusion of upward mobility for the middle class. Simply put, it will not make monetary sense to fill your tank up and go work for X amount of income if what is left over after massive taxes is not enough to make ends meet. Cutting back to just the essentials and trying to carry on in the workforce probably means driving a beater car, selling the McMansion and downsizing to a crackerbox house, and so on. Most normies will try this for a while, but will probably fail to downsize before they are forclosed.
The overpaid pretend work white collar jobs that most upwardly mobile Americans have grown accustomed to since the 1950’s are going to go away anyway. Businesses, like individuals and households, are going to have to cut out the useless extravagances, and what most people do for “work” in the corporate world today amounts to useless electronic paper shuffling and opining about policy trivia in business meetings.
The low end of the working world will not be much better off. For example, I don’t think people in the food service industry for one will be keeping those jobs. The wipeout of the white collar types will reduce eating out to a trickle on the one hand, and the tax police auditing every waiter and waitress in the country for unreported tip income will clinch it. Why would anyone spend 40 or more hours a week working, only to just barely break even. All the while, our domestic welfare leisure class will be sitting at home being paid and fed and they are being joined by millions of new foreign looters as I write this.
Along with everything else the Left has managed to break recently, I think they have finally had their own way enough to ensure that there will shortly be more people sitting in the wagon rather than pulling it. When that tipping point is reached, the wagon will just stop. The 87,000 Tax Gestapo agents are going to have a smaller pool of productive people to go after by the day. The lucky ones will get assigned to track down former taxpayers in the slums and Bidenville homeless camps to audit. The unlucky agents will be getting the much less healthy enforcement assignments on people who have been waiting for them for a long time.

it's just Boris · September 2, 2022 at 10:00 am

A long time ago, I heard it postulated that the existence of a strong, prosperous middle class is something of an aberration, historically speaking. Under the right conditions one will arise, but it tends to be an unstable equilibrium, and so conditions revert to a large poor population, a rather small rich / leadership cadre, and a rather small “artisanal” class that makes a decent living catering to the rich’s desires for luxury and high-quality things. The artisanal class’s challenge is not to get to the rich cadre – vanishingly small chance of that – but rather to simply avoid sinking.

Recent years have made me reflect on this more and more frequently.

Bear Claw Chris Lapp · September 3, 2022 at 8:51 am

Wait till Tuesday. It’s going to be epic

lynn · September 3, 2022 at 7:22 pm

A lot of people are working off the books. Mostly illegals or else they are working on a stolen social security number. The IRS knows the real numbers of how many hundreds of people are sharing a single social.

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