Our Ongoing and Seemingly Never Ending U.S. Underemployment, Pay and Job Growth Woes Continue While the President 'Fiddles' with Climate Change

The U.S. economy continues to grow each month, albeit slowly.

In fact, this is the slowest multi-year subpar economic recovery from any economic recession in memory. The inescapable fact is that instead of having now reached and surpassed the historically normal annual growth rate of 3%, we are muddling along at a ~2% growth rate with no end in sight.

Prices paid for purchased goods, including energy and imported products, are low. That's the good news.

Manufacturing employment gains and wage and salary increases are missing. That's the bad news.

In a globally competitive employment environment, the U.S. is losing the jobs competition for high paying manufacturing jobs. Thus, low wage part-time local service employees are the winners and high wage full-time U.S. based manufacturing employees are the losers.

Sadly, that's not likely to change anytime soon as government policies continue to ignore manufacturing in particular and the private sector in general. Energy and tax policy provide the clear and unmistakable evidence of this wrongheaded government stance.

Share of Americans in labor force shrinks to 38-year low is subtitled 'Labor force participation rate is lowest since Jimmy Carter era:'

                                                                       

"One of the most disappointing parts of a dismal U.S. jobs report for September was another decline in the percentage of Americans in the labor force.

The so-called labor-force participation rate continued its steady march lower, falling to 62.4% in September, government data show. That’s the lowest reading since October 1977, long before Americans turned sour on first-year President Jimmy Carter.

 

In other words, barely six in 10 of all working-age Americans have a job or are looking for one.

The participation rate peaked at 67.2% in 1997, fell slightly over the next decade, and then tumbled during the Great Recession. It’s been falling ever since. It had been at 62.6% for the previous three months.

Much of the decline in participation can be attributed to waves of baby boomers retiring. And more young people are going to college or staying in school longer, hoping to buff their credentials before entering the labor market. It’s harder for them get a good job than it was when their parents were young.

 

Yet those factors alone can’t explain all or necessarily even most of the decline.

 

Consider prime-age Americans who are 25 to 34 years old, past the age when most graduate from college. Their rate of involvement in the labor force fell to 80.6% in September — just a tick above the all-time low — from 84% in early 2008, just as the recession was starting.

 

With job openings at an all-time high and the economy on more solid ground compared to just a few years ago, more so-called millennials should be joining the labor force and finding work. But that hasn’t been the case."

Summing Up

The economy still struggles while the President talks about climate change.

The jobs market, tax policy and the U.S. energy and manufacturing sectors are in need of our President's immediate attention.

Yet the needs of the private sector continue to be ignored by this administration to the detriment of American workers and especially our young people.

And that's not all --- Socialist Bernie Sanders and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, along with many of the Republican candidates for the presidency, are not even discussing the growing unaffordability for future taxpayers of already enacted (1) entitlement programs and 2) the cost of education from K-12 through trade schools and college.

 

With respect to energy, a drill, baby, drill and then both use and export what we have drilled discussion, along with approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, are absent from too many of the stump speeches.

 

Also missing is a much needed discussion of school vouchers and reducing the cost of education which are now possible by implementing distance learning and other low cost teaching enhancements made available by the internet.

 

And the ever growing debt burdens of government and far too many American individuals and families are not a serious part of the political discussion either.

At the very least, a candid conversation about the reasons and remedies for too few high paying American based jobs and the causes of our ongoing slow economic growth, including too much waste in government at all levels, are of vital interest to most Americans --- yet the deafening silence from Washington continues.

We the People deserve better. Why don't we demand better?

That's my question du jour in search of an answer.

 

Thanks. Bob.