Pundits may be trying to spin this Friday's jobs report as indicative of an ongoing recovery, emphasizing that as of May, all the jobs that were lost since December 2007 have now been recovered, or this chart...
However the same pundits fail to mention is that while it took the Fed some $2.7 trillion in incremental liquidity to regain all the lost jobs (and concurrently push the S&P to absolutely ridiculous record numbers), at the same time the US population, which grew by 14.8 million since December 2007, has lost a record 12.8 million people form the labor force, which remains at an all time high 92 million!
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Further digging into the data, here are two other things you won't hear from the permabulls: while the May job gain of 217K was respectable, breaking down the jobs by age group as shown by the household survey, shows that not only did the majority of the jobs go to the lowest paying wages for yet another month, but for Americans in their prime working years, those aged 25-54, May was a month in which some 110K workers either lost their jobs, or were moved into the oldest, 55-69 age group.
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Furthermore, while the total number of jobs may have recovered its post December 2007 losses, for Americans aged 25-54, there is still a long, long time to go, with the prime US age group still over 2.6 million jobs short of recovering all of its post December-2007 losses.
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Finally, continuing the qulitative breakdown of the jobs breakdown in the US, one group that has gotten the decidedly short end of the stick are stay at home dads, which according to a recent Pew research [9]study have increased by a whopping 100% to 2 million from the 1.1 milion in 1989:
The number of fathers who do not work outside the home has risen markedly in recent years, up to 2 million in 2012. High unemployment rates around the time of the Great Recession contributed to the recent increases, but the biggest contributor to long-term growth in these “stay-at-home fathers” is the rising number of fathers who are at home primarily to care for their family.
Visually:
Bloomberg has more: [10]
The number of fathers at home with their children reached a high of 2.2 million in 2010 in the wake of the recession, which ended in June 2009. While the figure fell to 2 million in 2012 as unemployment declined, it was still almost double the 1.1 million stay-at-home dads in 1989, according to the report.
Fathers account for a growing share of stay-at-home parents in the U.S., with almost a quarter of the men reporting they’re at home because they can’t find a job. Dads represented 16 percent of all parents not working outside the home in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1989, a report released today by the Pew Research Center in Washington shows. There are more than five times as many stay-at-home mothers.
“The share of dads specifically there to care for those at home has been growing steadily across time,” said Gretchen Livingston, the report’s lead author. “We still see a steady increase in this number.”
The report follows a study Pew released two months ago that showed American mothers are reversing a historical trend and increasingly staying home, a change driven by demographic, social and economic forces. The increase in stay-at-home fathers is also related to economic forces, this study found.
Don't blame it on the economy... blame it on disabilities.
As is the case among mothers, stay-at-home fathers are less well-off financially and have lower educational attainment than their working counterparts, the report said. At-home fathers are twice as likely to lack a high school diploma as working fathers -- 22 percent to 10 percent -- and almost half are living in poverty compared with 8 percent who work outside the home.
The largest share of stay-at-home fathers -- 35 percent -- say they are there because of their own illness or disability, the report said. This contrasts with stay-at-home mothers, just 11 percent of whom cited those reasons.
And while the overall average age of working-age Americans continues to rise ever higher (with the 25-54 age group consistently depressed), one subset of Americans that is leaving the workforce are the same disenfrachised fathers, caring for their children:
Stay-at-home dads also tend to be older than such mothers, which may partially explain why so many more are ill or disabled. While 43 percent of stay-at-home fathers are 45 years or older, only 21 percent of stay-at-home mothers are in that age group.
About one in five stay-at-home fathers say the main reason they are there is to care for their home or family, representing a fourfold increase from 1989 when only 5 percent of them said that. Among mothers, the number is 73 percent.
It gets worse:
Stay-at-home dads get less respect, the study found. About half of Americans said children are better off if their mother is home and doesn’t hold a job, compared with just 8 percent who said that about fathers, according to a 2013 Pew survey. That finding shows Americans “still very much differentiate between a stay-at-home mom and a stay-at-home dad in terms of the value to children,” Livingston said.
Well, reverse feminism may not be particularly strong in the US, and neither is the so-called recovery. But at least demand for propaganda spin masters has never been greater, regardless of age or domestic father status.