The Labor Force Participation Rate Continues to Languish
Ignore the cheerleading from the Biden Administration and Wall Street concerning job growth. Most of the jobs that have been added are merely replacements for those lost during Covid (jobs that disappeared primarily as a consequence of the insane reaction to Covid from Joe Biden and his cohorts in the Democratic Party).
The American Rescue Plan re-opened 99% of schools, helped create over 8 million jobs, and sparked the fastest economic growth in decades.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 7, 2022
And today, with the Special Financial Assistance program, it will protect the pension benefits of millions of union workers and retirees.
The real picture is much more concerning. The labor force participation rate continues to hemorrhage workers (meaning able bodied workers are just disappearing from the labor force en masse), falling well short of it's February 2020 level. In fact, the Covid recession has actually maintained the negative trajectory of the labor force participation rate (chart below) that followed the 2008 GFC. The labor force participation rate is now at a level last seen in the 1970s, a time before many women had entered the labor force. It is also worth noting that a disproportionate ratio of women have fallen out of the labor force this time around when compared to their male cohorts.
Millions went missing from the labor market after the GFC as well, this has now happened twice. Here is a complement to Lance's chart with a longer term perspective. https://t.co/F3cEADrvMs pic.twitter.com/YrwkyEIpD6
— moist_turtel (@moist_turtel) July 7, 2022