Trump's "forgotten" Americans aren't represented in the historic low unemployment rate

[DonViejo]

Updated by Alexia Fernández Campbell@[e-mail] Jun 2, 2017, 4:40pm EDT

The May jobs report made headlines Friday with a positive bit of news: The unemployment rate has dropped to historic levels — 4.3 percent. It hasn’t been that low since 2001. But there’s a statistic behind the unemployment rate that tells a different story about the economy. The main reason unemployment shrank is because the number of people working or actively looking for work shrank. And when the actual number of people looking for work drops, they are no longer considered unemployed and are no longer counted in the federal unemployment rate.

Many of these people are President Trump’s “forgotten” Americans: Working-class men who dropped out of the labor force, frustrated with the lack of well-paying jobs, turned out en masse to vote for Trump in November.

The labor force participation rate reveals more about how they’re doing. That number dropped from 62.9 percent to 62.7 percent between April and May. But that could be a temporary blip for several reasons. Maybe more baby boomers retired in May than in April, or maybe more teenagers quit their part-time jobs. The workers whose behavior says the most about the health of the US economy are those in their prime working years — those between the ages of 25 and 54. Their participation in the workforce also dropped in May, from 81.7 percent to 81.5.

While a one-month change is hardly alarming, the longer-term trend shows that Americans are still more disengaged from the labor force than they were before the recession. Ten years ago, 83 percent of prime-age Americans were working or looking for work.

more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/2/15728650/unemployment-rate-jobs-report-may

[shraby]

1. My guess is the low rate is due to baby boomers retiring and leaving the job market.

That was a pretty huge bump in the numbers when the entered the job market and they will leave a mark when they quit working.
It's just nicely beginning and will go one for at least a couple more years.
This will leave employers screaming for more help that isn't coming because the numbers just aren't there.

This will effect a lot of the picture. As they downsize their living quarters, there will be a glut of houses up for sale, their car requirements will be for smaller, more gas efficient cars. Use the imagination and maybe you can ferret out more effects.

[leftstreet]

2. Yep. About 10,000 a day

Although that doesn't represent the numbers continuing to work beyond 62-65, it does represent the numbers qualifying for benefits


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/07/24/do-10000-baby-boomers-retire-every-day/?utm_term=.6ee344c8e1ac

Ten thousand people a day is certainly a big number. Over 365 days, that’s almost 4 million people. But then everything about the “Baby Boom” generation is pretty big.

There were 76 million people born between the years 1946 and 1964, the traditional window for the baby boom generation. That means that they will retire over a 19-year period. Simple math shows that 76 divided by 19 is 4 million, or almost 11,000 people a day.

While a certain percentage will die before they reach retirement age, analysts say that immigrants will actually boost the number of potential baby-boomer retirees to nearly 80 million —and not everyone retires exactly at 65 or 66. Some baby boomers likely retired at 62. So let’s say it’s 80 million over 20 years—which still yields 4 million a year.