Health & Fitness
How Obama slashed median household income 5.7% in less than four years
Median household income has declined by 5.7% in less than four years because 9.2 million people have been added to the working-age population while only 1.2 million jobs have been created.
It was easy!
1. Add 9.2 million people to the working age population.
(Increase in age 16+ noninstitutional population from January, 2009 to October, 2012. That's 205,000 people per month. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CNP16OV?cid=104)
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2. But only create 1.2 million jobs.
(That's the real job gain from January, 2009 to October, 2012. That's 26,600 jobs added per month. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000 )
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3. So you have more people, but you haven't created jobs for them, so you have a smaller percentage of the population working.
(The percentage of the age 16+ noninstitutional population working decllined from 60.6% in January, 2009 to 58.8% in October, 2012 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000)
4. And of those working, more are working part time.
(See chart in my previous post.)
5. And presto! Median household income declines by 5.7% in less than four years!
What a great achievement.
If you are wondering where Obama's inane claim of creating five million jobs comes from, it's from not counting job losses during his term of office. So I go to the roulette wheel with $1,000, leave three hours later with $1,000, and tell you I won $500 because at one point I was down $500. Yup, that's the logic. If you can call it that.
OK, you ask, why does the news media perseverate like brain-damaged baboons over the unemployment rate when it has no particular relationship to the two things that determine a country's wealth -- productivity of labor and percentage of the population employed? I have no idea. We could have 1% of the population employed, and be living in refrigerator boxes, and still have a zero percent unemployment rate (if nobody was looking for work). Or we could have 90% of the population working and a ten percent unemployment rate (if everyone without a job was looking for one). But why belabor the point, I discussed it in excessive detail previously.
Whoever our next president is, he will have his work cut out for him.
