I agree, though I wouldn’t characterize it as useless just not extremely insightful. My only point is that (back of the envelope) if about 100k people were born each month 60-65 years ago, we would expect about 100k people to retire each month this year and the distinction between whether people retire in the month of their birth or not is irrelevant.
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I agree the month of their birth is not relevant, but I also think age is not nearly as relevant as the discussion here makes it out to be. People choose to retire based on multiple factors and sometimes age isn’t even a consideration.
Yeah.
With one modification : About 40% of those people weren’t working in the first place. So that would make it about 60k people retiring monthly.
That’s a good point. The old pension system we had, grew with the number of years employed. Due to that, most people retired the same month they were hired to move the number of years employed at the company by one and that had nothing to do with their birth month.
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Yeah and our pension system uses your age plus years of service. So thats 2 variables in the figure, your age and your start date.
I would tend to agree that the shortage of labor issues are actually in the lower wage services part of the market.
I think there is a lot of mobility for such workers if they bother to look, and I really don’t know how many of these fast food restaurants are getting people.
When I see Walmart offering $1 a day subsidized college, it tells me that it is facing issues getting people. It also tells me it really wants to reduce its average employee age for many other financial reasons.
May unemployment rate among bachelor degree holders is 1.8%.
“A look at the past 70 years shows unemployment bottoms out months just before recessions start.” “On average, unemployment hits a low a little less than 5 1/2 months before a recession starts”.
This is a nearly useless statement. It’s like saying the stock market hits a high before it retreats. Of course it must. Hitting a low is defined by it being higher afterwards, and hitting a high is defined by being lower afterwards.
The reason it’s useless is because it relies on predicting the future - The current level is not a low “bottom” (or high “peak”) if next month’s or next years is lower (or higher) than now. And you don’t know that until that time comes. Yes, it’s easy to read the historical chart afterwards to see the peak.
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But it’s not like how big is the universe. We know where we’ve bottomed-out previously, and it’s even more limited this time because the ‘Labor Force Participation Rate’ is the lowest in decades.
Obviously, illegal immigrants are not considered in the “unemployment rate” calculations, but the reality is many jobs have been lost nationwide due to deportation. This causes jobs that used to be filled but no longer are and now needing to be filled.
I have no idea to what extent this really plays out in market conditions but it has to have some effect on current unemployment rates as it opens up new jobs and they are inevitably filled by those who would otherwise be unemployed. When those actively looking for jobs fill the need it reduces unemployment to an extent where there is even a job shortage, I believe there is an absolute correlation.
Perhaps the economy is doing great because of recent tax changes spurring growth but you can’t ignore the fact that a reduction in illegal immigrant workforce also has a play in the statistics.
I don’t think this has much impact. And the deportation rate was down in 2017 vs 2016. And it assumes that deportations is a net decrease over the number of people who might be sneaking in illegally at the same time. Its a revolving door and deportations is only one direction. They aren’t stopping people coming in.
Total deportations in 2017 was about 225k
Labor force in the US is about 160M
All the people deported equates to 0.1% of the labor force.
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Of course the media over dramatizes recent deportation to make headlines, but I also think real numbers haven’t recently been released to minimize political tension. Call me a skeptical democrat and maybe you’re right, it has very little actual effect on the economy but I’ll stand by my skepticism.
I’m not intending to take this to a political OT as I don’t have any real content to substantiate my post. It may actually have more to do with recent tax reform and a thriving economy than deportation. Are there any 2018 numbers out yet?
ICE removals are reported annually. The 2017 numbers came out in January this year.
I never understood why people think that a reduction in tax rates increases business spending. Taxes are paid on profits. Hiring a new employee or buying equipment is a pre-tax expense. Assume I have a profitable small business. If my marginal tax rate is 30%, then every dollar I spend in the business costs 70 cents out of my pocket (i.e., the amount I would have kept after tax on that dollar). But if my marginal tax rate is 21%, then every dollar I spend on business now costs me 79 cents out of pocket. So lower taxes make business expenses more expensive. By this logic, reducing business taxes should cause a decrease in business spending, and conversely, increasing taxes should increase spending.
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It may be psychological or emotional but I have seen this first-hand. Taxes go down, small business owner feels more optimistic about the future and hires or buys equipment or land.
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But most of those are jobs American citizens won’t do, or at least not at those wages. Would you pick lettuce for $5/hour ?
A) As detailed in the other thread, GDP declined, critical business investment declined, and the ‘Labor Force Participation Rate’ declined, after the passage of the tax cuts.
B) The national economy had already previously been “great”:
~ May marked the 92nd straight month of job growth (that’s more than 7.5 years)
~ GDP had already hit 3.5% in the 3rd QTR of 2016, BEFORE the election.
To paraphrase Mr. Rogers, “Can you say coasting boys and girls ? I knew you could.”
There’s just no non–anecdotal evidence to support that.
I can find data for Texas :
Chart shows a steep increase in the % of businesses reporting increase in outlook right around the start of the year and the % has held steady much higher then previous few years.
This is a bad argument. If the minimum wage is not applicable to everyone why does it exist at all?