If You're Unreasonably Happy, and Need a Downer...

Go read this:  Five scary charts and facts about who’s working and not working in this economy.  Mary Katherine Ham ruined my day, and that's not what gazing at her smiling face usually does for me...

The Phony Recovery...

Whenever a politician tells you that our economy is recovering, remember this graph.  We won't have a real recovery until the employment-population ratio gets back up above 61% or so.  Any politician who tells you otherwise is lying.  Or as Mark Twain would say, they're opening their mouth (as the only thing likely to emerge is a lie)...

Summer of Recovery: NOT!

This pretty much says it all, doesn't it?  If you're not familiar with EMRATIO, it's sometimes called the “participation rate” – the percentage of the civilian population who are working at any given time. This is (to my mind, at least) a far more useful indicator than the “unemployment rate” trumpeted in the media – that number is “adjusted” for all sorts of things, and doesn't really tell us very much.  EMRATIO, on the other hand, is the raw data.

So what does this chart tell us?  Let's look at January 2005, when the EMRATIO was 62.3%.  Now let's look at January 2012, when it was 58.5%.  That's a drop of 3.8% in that 7 year period.  Doesn't sound like much?  Consider this: the U.S. population in January 2012 was about 310 million people.  If the EMRATIO were the same in January 2012 as it was in January 2007, then 3.8% x 310 million more people would be working.  That's almost 12 million more people who would be working.

Obama and his fellow Democrats have cost us 12 million jobs....