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Job Totals Trail Pre-Recession Levels in 10 U.S. States
Every candidate shouts about job creation, and some talk about the recovery from the last recession. Every month the Department of Labor releases new statistics about how many jobs have been created, improvements in the unemployment rate, and on and on.
There are parts of the society and the country where some of that is even partly true. But for about 20% of our states, it is not even partly close. An awful lot of the good news is just a numbers game.Data compiled by the Associated Press shows ten U.S. states still have not regained all the jobs they lost in the Great Recession, even after six and a half years of “recovery,” while many more have seen only modest gains.
The figures are one more sign of the economic inequality, the one field America remains the undisputed global leader. The on-the-ground reality of negative job growth is why many Americans feel the economy has passed them by, and fuels support for angry candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Who LostWyoming has three percent fewer jobs it did when the recession began. Alabama’s job total post-recession is -2.7 percent, followed by New Mexico at -2.6. New Jersey (Chris Christie!) has one percent fewer jobs than it did at the end of 2007, and Missouri is just below its pre-recession level. The other five losers are Mississippi, Nevada, Maine, Connecticut, and West Virginia.
Among the other states, several show only small gains past pre-recession job totals. Illinois, statewide with a population of over 12 million, has only 8,600 more jobs than it did in December 2007. Arizona’s job count is up just 9,200 with a population of six million (not counting illegal aliens.) And Ohio (Kasich!!!) has added just 58,100 jobs with its population of almost 12 million. Those gains are more or less (it’s less) statistically insignificant.
Who Won
The states that saw the highest rates of job growth tell the story of the last few years. Some of the biggest gainers include:
Washington DC is a big, big winner, with significant growth from America’s largest employer, the federal government, all fueled significantly by the very profitable War of Terror.
The oil and gas drilling boom lifted North Dakota’s job count by more than 20 percent, though falling energy prices have caused significant layoffs in the past year. Need to check back with North Dakota in a year or two.
Texas has also benefited from the energy boom, as well as greater high-tech hiring in cities like Austin.
Utah and Colorado have also benefited from fast-growing information technology companies. Colorado especially has a large aerospace (read: defense) industry, so good for them.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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teri said...
1And of the numbers of new jobs, how many are just jobs like working ten hours a week at McDonalds or having a two-week gig with a temp agency? Those count as “jobs”.
Taking population growth into account, not one state has held the line. Several hundred thousand new workers enter the US workforce each month; the [phony] numbers of “new jobs created”, or “jobs added this month” rarely meet the minimum required to correct the job losses from all the years previously and do nothing at all to take care of jobs needed for the newly-entering workers.
Almost 100 % of the new jobs “created” are part-time, or temporary positions, or self-created start-ups (i.e., I can’t find a job, so I am working free-lance and hoping for some contracts). In the US as a whole, we have millions fewer full-time jobs with benefits than we did in ’07. And that’s just raw numbers; take into account population growth, with new eligible workers seeking employment each month, and you see that we are in a huge deficit of full-time employment for the available workforce.
The Labor Force Participation Rate (percentage of eligible workers who actually have jobs) shows close to a 33 % unemployment number. 93 million people who can work do not have jobs. Good news though: the people who figure the LFPR have just decided to alter how they present their monthly data, which is usually based on monthly SS reports from employers. It’s been a gold standard until now, as it is based on real, hard data provided by actual employers and not the “birth-death models” or “seasonally adjusted” baloney usually printed in the newspapers. Henceforth, however, they will include as “employed” all the people who are seeking employment. I don’t know how they will work this mythical number into the formula (go door to door and ask everyone? Ask the NSA, as they collate the data they get from spying on our phone calls and emails, how many people seem to be looking for work? Make a wild guess at what people are thinking?), but you will soon find the LFPR is reporting the exact same happy numbers as the NY Times and the WaPo.
I am accepting donations to the Church of Crystal Blue Persuasion, by the way. We preach the merits of magical thinking, spells, and incantations to relieve the stress of the unmitigated bullshit raining down from your political leaders and the mainstream press. Our magic doesn’t work either, but the music is better and the congregation is wa-a-a-ay nicer.
04/7/16 8:02 AM | Comment Link
Bruce said...
2Precis! In < 1 minute!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUrtFD6-wH4
AND, I can't get even one half percent interest on my CU (later … Much LATER) Life's savings …
I'm Yellen', TOO!
04/7/16 2:10 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
3I made the snarky comment in 2008 that Obama would magically get the unemployment numbers to say 5.2% when it came time to hand the baton to the next Democratic nominee in 2016.
04/7/16 2:12 PM | Comment Link
Links 8/4/2016: OpenMandriva Lx3 Beta 1, ubuntuBSD 15.10 Beta 4 | Techrights said...
4[…] Job Totals Trail Pre-Recession Levels in 10 U.S. States […]
04/8/16 5:22 AM | Comment Link
gene said...
5teri said “I am accepting donations to the Church of Crystal Blue Persuasion, by the way. We preach the merits of magical thinking, spells, and incantations to relieve the stress of the unmitigated bullshit raining down from your political leaders and the mainstream press.”
Ha! sign me up darlin’! I am reminded of Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan, when he famously compared central banking to the fantasy world of peter pan! “I trust that many of you are familiar with the story of Peter Pan, in which it says, ‘the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,’ ”
http://www.dailyrepublic.com/opinion/statenationalcolumnists/japans-central-bank-faces-peter-pan-problem/
A song for the times…
04/8/16 10:23 AM | Comment Link