So far, I can only find where the Census breaks out by age in a way that matches the BLS (that is, 16+) back to 1995. Before that is piles and piles of data broken up by each age (16, 17, 18) which is often by state and is going to take a lot more work. And I gotta go to the store. I'm out of dog treats. This is Just Wrong according to my dogs.
But this morning, I was fiddling with the numbers and came up with the change from year to year which looks like this:
Again, let's give the GOPsters the bursting of the tech bubble and that 9/11 would cause a slump no matter who was in office.
Whether or not 9/11 would have happened if the entire Bush administration wasn't off picking its nose is rather pointless speculation. The damning thing is they didn't even try. Still, even if everybody is on their game, we can't stop all terrorism all the time. And on that note, I do love how the right insists we admire the "sacrifice of the troops" but when it comes to us, when it comes to we might have to risk "the ultimate sacrifice" in order to remain a free society, we're all supposed to run around shreiking or cower under the bed.
It's a long way from "Give me liberty or give me death" eh?
What I find interesting in this dollop of number soup is the rate of growth started to slow in 2006. 2007 was horrifically anemic and 2008 was, well, free fall. And I hate roller coasters.
Point being, if the recession started last December (which I keep reading), what's the explanation for that inflection there? And while slow job growth isn't as bad as negative job growth, I'm pretty sure our population didn't slow down all of the sudden in 2006. I haven't yet tried a population verses employed graph and, to be honest, I'm a little scared of the idea. I get the feeling the gap is not going to be pretty.
Now this one gives me the willies:
Of course, caveat... um... Koskors? Kossackors? just caveat. I mean, this is still all very simplistic. The BLS counts as employable the entire population 16 years old and up. I have quibbles. If nothing else, it's been a long time now since we were an agricultural economy. While there are people at the low end of the economic scale that are "bread winners" at a very young age, the general trend in our post-WWII society has been toward pushing higher the age of graduating into the real world. The middle class (aka the nouveau destituteau) hasn't had to rely on Junior bringing home the money from getting my burger order wrong (sorry, back still acting up and I think I'm starting that "get offa my lawn" stage early).
On the but-I-bet-it's-significant hand, that means a lot of purely disposable income. Which drives a lot of economy. And if that's drying up, well, that's not good.
There's also the other end which I haven't yet accounted for. The population is "aging" in the sense that people are living longer. My own maternal grandparents each lived to 93. Between modern medicine and those genes, my mother, at 70, may be around to annoy me well into me receiving Social Security IOUs.
Remember, folks, the sky is falling! The sky is falling! Social Security is going to eat our babies! Won't somebody think of the children?!?
Hey, you! Yeah, you in the back row! Stop looking at that trillion dollars a year going to the military! We just have to spend more than the entire rest of, well, Earth on things that blow up. You never know when you might be attacked by a Middle Eastern goat herder and have to bomb France!
Or what if Mars needs women? Hmmm? You think of that you commie pinko libril fascist Chavez loving Castro smooching cheese eating surrender monkey troop hater?!?
Okay, so this is all still at the "raw data" stage. But just look at it. I have to have done something very, very wrong. If that crazy line is telling the truth, that's something like twenty plus million that went... um... well, they didn't went to work.
But we had low unemployment while Bush... erm... read books and cleared brush. I mean, didn't we?
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