Numbers

Strange, isn’t it, when you’ve been working with some statistics and then you hear others misquote them all over the place.  I heard some Republican say that there were only 132 million people with jobs.  Huh? Then I realized what he had done is take the 156 M in the workforce and subtract the underemployed 23.5 M to get 132.5 M.  But that’s bad math because many underemployed already have a job.  In the interests of clarity, here are some of the jobs statistics. (You can dig through BLS statistics on their website. It is perversely organized and hard to find what you want until you get used to it.)My numbers are perhaps a month or two in arrears in some cases, but basically accurate.

There are about 311 M people in the USA.  243.2 M are age 16 or greater and not institutionalized (Jail, mental hospitals, nursing homes,etc.) and the government calls this the adult non-institutionalized population.  Think of this as the total population that could be put to work.  But what the feds call the ‘workforce’ is really 156.5 M who are non-farm and either employed or currently looking for a job. The difference is 86.7M and they break down as 35.6M retired, 8.1M disabled, and about 43M stay-at-homes and students. 

 

Why the government breaks out the 2.5M farm owners and laborers is because they just start with a mindset that there is always work to do on a farm.  They are never without a job. (1.5M farmers and 1.0M laborers, many of which are family) They want to study only workers who can lose their jobs in some way.  But included in the 156M are also 15.0 M self-employed.  9.8M of these are sole proprietors or family helpers and 5.2M own their own corporations (usually an S-corp) and work for it.  There are also 19M government workers included in the 156M workforce.  They basically never lose jobs, but are treated as part of the workforce. Weird. 

 

There are 143M who have jobs.  The 13M who are unemployed (and currently looking) can be divided by the workforce of 156.5M and you get the unemployment rate (U3) of about 8.3 %.  But what if somebody gets discouraged and isn’t working except to help his uncle in the family bakery and lives with his parents while job shopping except that the government doesn’t know he is still looking?  Then he isn’t counted in the unemployment statistics anymore. That is where all the recent controversy has come from concerning unemployment statistics.  There are 143M with jobs today but in 2009 there were 144.5M.  There are fewer people with jobs, the population has been growing, how could there possibly be a lower unemployment rate than the 10.2% of 2009?  Answers:They are cooking the books by shrinking the workforce. (Remember you have to be currently looking to be counted)  If you adjust for what the workforce was in JA 2009 and project it to today, you get an effective unemployment rate of over 11%.  And just today the feds announced that they had created 86,000 jobs, but another 368,000 joined the 86.7M, i.e. dropped out of the workforce.  How do they determine those folks?  They do a phone survey of a few people who have dropped off the unemployment dole. Pretty fudgy statistic which somehow has been going down for exactly the time the current administration has been in office.  Weird, huh?

 

Subtract the government workers and the military from the 143M employed and you come up with a private workforce number of 111M workers.  That 111M (or 113M if you count farmers) basically supports the entire 311M people of America.  If you divide the workforce by the number of eligible adults you define a “participation rate” which used to be about 67-68% but is now about 63%, lowest it has been since the W-shaped recession of 1978-82. 

 

The median household income has declined from $54,000+ to $50,462 since JA 2009.  But here in Oklahoma our MHI is $39,023 and we are #43 among the states. They make more on the coasts but have much higher costs of living and pay a ton of taxes.  You can stretch your retirement a lot by living here.