The Unemployment Puzzle: Where Have All the Workers Gone?
A big puzzle looms over the U.S. economy: Friday's jobs report tells us that the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7% from a peak of 10% at the height of the Great Recession. But at the same time, only 63.2% of Americans 16 or older are participating in the labor force, which, while up a bit in March, is down substantially since 2000. As recently as the late 1990s, the U.S. was a nation in which employment, job creation and labor force participation went hand in hand. That is no longer the case.
What's going on? Think of the labor market as a spring bash you've been throwing with great success for many years. You've sent out the invitations again, but this time the response is much less enthusiastic than at the same point in previous years.
One possibility is that you just need to beat the bushes more, using reminders of past fun as "stimulus" to get people's attention. Another possibility is that interest has shifted away from your big party to other activities.
Economists are sorting out which of these scenarios best explains the slack numbers on labor-force participation—and offers the best hope of reversing them. Is the problem cyclical, so that, if we push for faster growth, workers will come back, as they have in the past with upturns in the business cycle? Or do deeper structural problems in the economy have to be fixed before we can expect any real progress? To the extent that problems are related to retirement or work disincentives that are either hard to change or created by policy, familiar monetary or fiscal policies may have little effect—a point getting too little attention in Washington.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304441304579477341062142388?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304441304579477341062142388.html%3Fmod%3DWSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
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but now nobody is responding to your invitations? 
Oh, I get it. Designed to obscure the real point of the article:
"In the first place, we need to encourage low-wage workers and remove barriers to their lasting participation in the labor force. This encouragement is particularly important given the downward pressure on wages encountered by many low-skilled employees in the face of globalization and technological change. "
IOW, we need to further starve the masses so they'll accept groveling for a pittance, because right now they're declining the "invitation" to the "work party" because they can't earn enough to pay the transportation never mind a living wage. Also, they lack the appropriate training and education. 
But we can't raise minimum wage because then they won't be "competitive" with slave-labor countries.
"For some, disability insurance has become an incentive to give up on work—but it doesn't have to be this way."
So we have to make it harder for people to get disability because otherwise they won't accept payment of a nonliving wage.
and so on. The only good news is the author recognizes the need for infrastructure re-build, but uses that as a way to blame Obama for having talked about "shovel-ready projects" and getting insufficient stimulus.
