More on Employment

Okay, so maybe it didn’t show much of an increase in jobs. But at least the BLS’s news release shows continued strong growth in the number of people outside of the labor force, i.e. people who aren’t working and who aren’t actively in the job market. Today’s BLS news release indicates that an astonishing 588,000 new people entered the ranks of the non-labor force.

In fact, as the graph shows, the Bush administration can take credit for adding a remarkable 6 million people to the ranks of those who aren’t participating in the labor force — all in just three years. That’s the strongest record of non-workforce creation in history; before the Bush administration took office, it took 10 full years (from Jan 1991 to Jan 2001) to add 6 million people to the non-workforce in the US.

Kash

p.s. Naturally this reflects the falling labor force participation rate, which in February dropped to 65.9 — the lowest rate in over 15 years. See this earlier post for more discussion about that phenomenon.