Excuses for the Weak Labor Market – Do the Kids Even Count?

What a honor! I must be Paul Krugman’s Mini Me. After all, Donald Luskin is Paul’s internet stalker and it seem Luskin’s Mini Me is stalking me as in a comment to this post. The comment simply plucked the following from the BLS report:

The declines were largely due to a drop in labor force participation among teenagers

You see – all that hard work that Frank did to provide us with a graph of how weak job growth has been going on for a while is bogus because workers between the ages of 16 and 19 really don’t count in certain rightwing circles.

Now it is true that the decline in the employment-population ratio from the 63.4% mark in December to the 62.8% mark in August was in part due to the fact this ratio for the teenagers dropped from 36.8% to 33.3%. While I would argue this matters too, our favorite troll is too lazy and/or too stupid to check what happened to the employment-population ratio for us older ones (ages 20 and up). You see it dropped from 65.5% in December to 65.1% in August.

But why should I expect our favorite troll to know the facts or to make a real point? He hasn’t yet. Which is why he is the perfect Mini Me for the Stupidest Man Alive.