I know it is Friday evening so I'll excuse your drinking and posting. 1) You said the individual took a 1/3 cut. Your numbers don't add up. If, as you say he was making $80,000. Now he is only making $53,333. 2) You said two people were working part-time and one was not employed. People working part time usually are earning close to minimum wage so let's say they each make $20,000 per year. $53,333 is more than $40,000 so your example is incorrect. I didn't see you make any specific income assumptions in #2 so your example could be interpreted anyway anyone chooses.
Maybe I needed to be more specific, but I though it was pretty clear that both situations were referring to the same family. The income of the father is the same regardless. You just assumed that I was talking about two different families.
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/02/03/participation-rate-issue-less "Participation Rate Issue Less Than Meets the Eye By Ross Kaminsky on 2.3.12 @ 2:10PM "As Aaron Goldstein and I have each noted, today's jobs report must be a short-term boost to President Obama. Over at intrade.com, Obama's betting odds to win re-election in 2012 are up from 55.5 percent yesterday (and 54.5 percent the day before) to 56.8 percent, having traded above 57 percent this morning. "But it's economics I want to talk about for a minute, rather than politics. "It is all the rage among conservatives, libertarians, and others who, like me, fear and loathe the Obama administration to point out the labor participation rate and suggest that the numbers are being manipulated to the advantage of Barack Obama and that labor statistics are barely-concealed "propaganda." "One of the leaders of this wave -- and a guy who I think is generally quite a good analyst -- is Tyler Durden who writes over at ZeroHedge.com. A perfect example is [here]. "I have some sympathy to this argument, but I think it's getting much more traction than it deserves, as you can see in the comments to Aaron's note and my note about the employment numbers. "But even someone who digs into the numbers as much and as well as Durden does can sometimes miss something important. "In particular, Durden says that the civilian non-institutional population rose by 1.7 million month-over-month but doesn't mention that almost all of that increase was due to an adjustment by Bureau of Labor Statistics based on the results of the 2010 census, plus smaller annual adjustments. "From the BLS report: " The adjustment increased the estimated size of the civilian noninstitutional population in December by 1,510,000, the civilian labor force by 258,000, employment by 216,000, unemployment by 42,000, and persons not in the labor force by 1,252,000. Although the total unemployment rate was unaffected, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio were each reduced by 0.3 percentage point. This was because the population increase was primarily among persons 55 and older and, to a lesser degree, persons 16 to 24 years of age. Both these age groups have lower levels of labor force participation than the general population. "In other words, the participation rate (employment-population ratio) was reported to have dropped by 0.3%, exactly the amount of participation rate "drop" created by changing the population number used in the calculation (due to updated census data.) Without this once-a-decade adjustment, the change in participation rate would have been reported as...wait for it...zero. "I don't want to overstate the significance of Durden's oversight, which conservative voices around the media and the web are also making, namely the idea that the participation rate dropped 0.3 percent and the labor force dropped more than 1.2 million in the past month. Those things are simply not true no matter how loudly people scream "conspiracy" and "propaganda." (Having been trading financial markets for about 25 years, I've heard these same accusations about economic data being manipulated to help the incumbent president -- whether Democrat or Republican -- so many times, they just bore me now.) "And while the actual participation rate might in fact be this new lower number, that would also mean that prior numbers were lower. In other words, the top-line change -- caused almost entirely by using new census population numbers -- is an artifact of the new census data, but few people have read to the end of the BLS report to get that important piece of information. "Furthermore, there are cyclical reasons that the participation rate shouldn't be as high now as it was a few years ago in a different part of the economic cycle, as economist Brian Wesbury (no liberal, he) [explains]. "Look, I don't like writing anything that is likely to benefit Barack Obama or his supporters. But the facts are the facts, and the claims of a big one-month drop in labor force and participation rate are simply wrong. If our side is going to call certain data "propaganda," the least we can do is make sure we understand the data."
pspr, you are getting lazy. Everyone who disagrees with you did so under the influence of alcohol? Sharpen that knife son, you are getting soft! This is P&R!
Who knows what the real numbers are, but there's one thing we can be absolutely sure of. If we were looking at a McCain/Palin administration and the DOW was up 6000+ points since spring of 2009, unemployment numbers trending down, GDP growth for multiple consecutive quarters...well, I don't think the righties would be doing much pissing and moaning about how bad things are.
You're right...the cheerleaders of the right are just as hopeless as the cheerleaders of the left. Unfortunately, you still seem stuck in this worthless debate of "left vs right".
Is that not what keeps this forum alive? If not for pointing out the hypocrisy of it all, whatever would we talk about?
It wasn't a disagreement as much as a misunderstanding. But thanks for getting your 2 cents in there, RCG Sharpton.
Sir Goog-a-Lot strikes again. From the article you posted: What he is arguing is the change in this report versus prior report, NOT the overall LFPR. In fact, he states this multiple times in the article. The LFPR is still at multi-decade lows, and the Jan report is still smoke and mirrors, creating the impression of a better than realistic job picture. Here's another angle to show it. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bCA8tR99ORA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> I know you like to drink the kool-aid, Ricter, so it's quite possible you will never have the wool removed from your eyes. If a man doesn't want to see, I guess he doesn't want to see.