200k New Jobs is Good News? You've Got to be Kidding Me?

Recently you may have heard about fast food workers striking, asking for higher wages and President Obama endorsing an increase to the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. And why not? After all we were told the "good news" that 200k jobs were created last month! Never mind that most of those jobs were part time. The main stream media celebrated the "great" numbers a s a sign the economy is picking up, even speculating that the Fed may begin tapering their $85 Billion per month printing spree.

But haven't we been told this by the same media outlets for the last five years? Do the media have any credibility after years of cheer leading the economy? Does our government have any credibility now that we know the Census Bureau cooked the books just before the 2012 election? 

Let's set aside the BS happy talk and look at some unpleasant reality shall we?



I've written on this blog about how we need to add somewhere between 200-250k jobs a month just to keep up with the population growth. Zerohedge points out some harsh truths:

As today's chart of the day shows, while the civilian noninstitutional population (i.e. employable Americans over the age of 16) grew by 2.4 million in the past year (from 244.2 million to 246.6 million), the US labor force somehow, very mysteriously, declined.

So the working population grew by 2.4 million last year. If I divide that by 12 months what do I get?

200 hundred thousand. So the the "great news" that we added 200k jobs last month merely means we are running in place. Never mind that those are mostly part time low paying jobs in the service industry.

The Burning Platform points out that its not just since 2008:

I’m baffled by the storyline portrayed by the dying legacy media, sponsored by Wall Street and the CEO executive suites of mega-corps, and supported by the propaganda data agencies of the U.S. government. The BLS, BEA,  CBO, CNBC, CNN, and a myriad of other government sponsored letters present supposedly accurate data that is designed to convince the ignorant masses everything is fine and their lives are improving.

For anyone willing to uncover the facts and think critically about the storyline being presented, an entirely different reality is revealed. The simple chart below obliterates the “official” storyline. Do you have the uncomfortable feeling that your financial situation has been declining for the first 13 years of the 21st Century?

Your beloved government puppets and their Wall Street puppeteers have used their control of the mainstream media to fully utilize Edward Bernays’ propaganda techniques to convince you that your household income has actually risen by 28% since 2000. There is a reason the government run public schools don’t teach children about inflation. They might figure out how badly they are getting screwed by their owners.

In reality, even using the heavily manipulated CPI numbers issued by the BLS, REAL median household income in the United States has FALLEN by 7% since 2000. Most households in the U.S. have less annual income than they did 13 years ago.

But it gets better. Median REAL household income is down 8% since the peak in 2008. Now for the government statistic reality check. According to the government and their media mouthpieces, the economy bottomed in 2009, with 10.3% unemployment and GDP bottoming at $14.34 trillion. Since the “official” end of the recession in 2009, the unemployment rate has plummeted to 7.0% and GDP has surged to $16.9 trillion.

If this government reported data is true, how could REAL median household income still be 4% lower than at the END of the recession in 2009? If all these jobs were created and the economy has truly grown by 18%, REAL median household income must be higher than it was in 2009. But it’s not.

The Americans who still have jobs are working for less money even thought the cost of food, clothing, fuel and taxes have gone up as noted below:






But hey, don't worry about the 68% increase in medical care cause Obama's got you covered. Remember when he told us the point was to "bend the cost curve down"? Reality seems to be otherwise:

According to S&S, the average deductible – the amount of money you spend out of pocket before your health insurance kicks in– for plans purchased by a 21-year old man in 2013 was $3,649, bought at an average monthly premium of $144. To purchase a plan with the same deductible now, a 21-year-old would have to pay $261, an 81% increase.

Sure. And, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it"!!

I'm sure that 21 year old will be thrilled that their minimum wage part time job created last month they got after accruing $40k in student loans will almost pay for their new Obamacare.

Or maybe not. Because CNBC reports that the new trend for young workers is not one of those 200k part time food service jobs but unpaid internships:

Still trying to rebound from the recession, American workers competing for scarce jobs are facing a new enemy: a youthful, eager and educated army willing to work for free.
In numbers up to 2 million, the increasingly dominant presence of unpaid or low-paid interns in the workforce is taking much-needed entry level jobs away from salaried employees.

"It's not like give and take, it's more like just taking," said Army veteran Eric Ortiz, 41, who worked as an unpaid intern at a publishing company from September 2012 to May 2013. Doing graphic design work in exchange for college credit, Ortiz said the company continually added extensions on to his contract with the implied promise of a future paid job.

"They'd say, 'Things are looking up, but we can still use your help,' so I hung around, hoping they'd make me an offer. It turned out to be just a lot of empty promises."

For older workers its often times no better:

  It has been a painful slide. A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward's middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.

Ms. Barrington-Ward describes it as "my journey through hell." She was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

"I've been turned down from McDonald's because I was told I was too articulate," she says. "I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn't speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was 'too pretty.' I've also been told point-blank to my face, 'We don't hire the unemployed.' And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately."

 Compare that to a REAL economic recovery. When I posted What A Real Recovery Looks Like Part II , I pointed out that in one month in 1983 that during the Reagan recovery the economy added over one million jobs! That was with a 1983 US population of 233 million Americans. Compare that to today's population of 329 million Americans. So today's equivalent would be about 1.5 million jobs in a single month.

So really? 200k jobs is good news and we should be cheering? You've got to be kidding me.