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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a grim quarterly report this week that found the small business outlook on the U.S. economy continues to decline. The percentage of small businesses planning to add a few employees declined from 18% to 16% in the second quarter, while those with plans to add many employees remained stuck at 1%.
This isnt primarily due to flat sales. That was actually the #3 reason for holding off on making new hires and it was virtually tied with dread of ObamaCare. The number of businesses citing ObamaCare as their top concern continued to grow.
Eighty percent of small businesses responding to the Chamber of Commerce survey said they would rather have Washington get out of the way than offer a helping hand. Fat chance, guys. The past failures of the political class are invariably viewed as reasons for more power and control.
Small businesses are the primary engine of job creation, as everyone right up to President Obama agrees. Their reluctance to hire anyone is a troubling sign of the long unemployment wasteland stretching ahead. Making things worse is the growing trend toward long-term unemployment. A rising number of people have become, in a word, unemployable.
The Economist has some terrible statistics:
Over 6 million Americans, more than 40% of all those unemployed, have now been out of work for more than six months. Most of these, 4.5 million, havent worked for a year or more. This crisis of long-term joblessness is unprecedented in the post-war period.
[ ] Workers are escaping unemployment more slowly than at any time since 1948. The long-term unemployed are struggling most; in the year to June, the newly jobless were three times more likely to find new work in a given month than the long-term unemployed. Many of the latter have given up hope. For the first time in decades, jobless workers are more likely to drop out of the labor force (and cease to be counted as unemployed) than to get a job.
(Emphasis mine.) This latter point is important to keep in mind when considering unemployment news, because the widely reported U-3 measurement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics deliberately excludes those who have dropped out of the workforce entirely. For September, the official U-3 figure held steady at 9.1%, and made headlines. The real unemployment number, the U-6 measurement that includes discouraged workers, rose from 16.2% to 16.5%.
Peterson Institute visiting fellow Howard Rosen, quoted in a Politico article that notes the percentage of people unemployed for six months or longer hasnt risen above 26% during the past fifty years, sees the U.S. work force contracting as the population increases:
We have an immediate problem, which is that people are dropping out of the labor force, said Howard Rosen, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. It drains the potential of our economy to grow.
The working-age population increased by 3.8 million over the past two years, but the net size of the labor force has declined by 768,000, he noted.
As you might expect, this is especially tough on young people with low skills entering the workforce as the population increases. In this era of workforce decline, its hard to get hired without experience, and its hard for a young person to get experience if nobody will hire them. The adjusted unemployment rate for September among those aged 16 to 19 was 24.6%, while it was 14.7% for ages 20 to 24. The situation is even worse for men in both brackets. At age 16 to 19, their unemployment rate is 27.9%, a whopping 6.6% higher than women in the same age group.
Read more Rise of the Unemployables - HUMAN EVENTS
This isnt primarily due to flat sales. That was actually the #3 reason for holding off on making new hires and it was virtually tied with dread of ObamaCare. The number of businesses citing ObamaCare as their top concern continued to grow.
Eighty percent of small businesses responding to the Chamber of Commerce survey said they would rather have Washington get out of the way than offer a helping hand. Fat chance, guys. The past failures of the political class are invariably viewed as reasons for more power and control.
Small businesses are the primary engine of job creation, as everyone right up to President Obama agrees. Their reluctance to hire anyone is a troubling sign of the long unemployment wasteland stretching ahead. Making things worse is the growing trend toward long-term unemployment. A rising number of people have become, in a word, unemployable.
The Economist has some terrible statistics:
Over 6 million Americans, more than 40% of all those unemployed, have now been out of work for more than six months. Most of these, 4.5 million, havent worked for a year or more. This crisis of long-term joblessness is unprecedented in the post-war period.
[ ] Workers are escaping unemployment more slowly than at any time since 1948. The long-term unemployed are struggling most; in the year to June, the newly jobless were three times more likely to find new work in a given month than the long-term unemployed. Many of the latter have given up hope. For the first time in decades, jobless workers are more likely to drop out of the labor force (and cease to be counted as unemployed) than to get a job.
(Emphasis mine.) This latter point is important to keep in mind when considering unemployment news, because the widely reported U-3 measurement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics deliberately excludes those who have dropped out of the workforce entirely. For September, the official U-3 figure held steady at 9.1%, and made headlines. The real unemployment number, the U-6 measurement that includes discouraged workers, rose from 16.2% to 16.5%.
Peterson Institute visiting fellow Howard Rosen, quoted in a Politico article that notes the percentage of people unemployed for six months or longer hasnt risen above 26% during the past fifty years, sees the U.S. work force contracting as the population increases:
We have an immediate problem, which is that people are dropping out of the labor force, said Howard Rosen, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. It drains the potential of our economy to grow.
The working-age population increased by 3.8 million over the past two years, but the net size of the labor force has declined by 768,000, he noted.
As you might expect, this is especially tough on young people with low skills entering the workforce as the population increases. In this era of workforce decline, its hard to get hired without experience, and its hard for a young person to get experience if nobody will hire them. The adjusted unemployment rate for September among those aged 16 to 19 was 24.6%, while it was 14.7% for ages 20 to 24. The situation is even worse for men in both brackets. At age 16 to 19, their unemployment rate is 27.9%, a whopping 6.6% higher than women in the same age group.
Read more Rise of the Unemployables - HUMAN EVENTS