More proof that the Bush economy sucks. The AP
explains that "the share of the working-age population working or actively seeking a job - known as the participation rate - fell to 65.8% in January, the lowest reading in 17 years, according to numbers collected by the Labor Department."
This
Bureau of Labor Statistics generated graph shows the 20 year trend:
Either the Bushes are cursed or something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And these wildly divergent explanations blame everything else possible but government policy:
Economists offer a variety of factors behind the decline: a loss of factory jobs, where some are unqualified to snag other jobs; people getting out of the 9-to-5 grind to go back to school; people deciding to be a stay-at-home mom or dad; and people abandoning job searches because they can't find a job at a pay level they want.
The story continues:
The participation rate hit an all-time high of 67.3 percent in early 2000 - when the economy was still roaring and employers had a hardy appetite to hire workers. After that, the rate slowly drifted downward as the economy suffered through the 2001 recession and then struggled to recover.
[...]
Some suggest the drop partly reflects the loss of 2.8 million factory jobs over the last four years, where some people who were unqualified or didn't get retrained for other jobs found themselves stuck.
[...]
Other factors behind the drop in the rate cited by economists and employment experts include: people abandoning job searches because they can't find a job at the pay level they want; younger people leaving a job to go back to school; and couples choosing for any number of reasons to have a single breadwinner.
I'm no economist. But is it that much in dispute whether these trends are signs of economic distress or just "cultural" factors (e.g. "couples choosing...to have a single breadwinner")? Is this further evidence for this guy's projection?