Next, I want to look at employment trends. These are some of the most important of all; we will first look at the ratio of employed to the population,found in this graph:
The importance of this cannot be overstated - it points out a stark reality that nobody wants to face - the number of people being added to "not in labor force" has been rising precipitously since the 2000 recession and still is!
We have spent a full decade without returning one net person on an annualized basis to the labor force - indeed, during most of the decade people were leaving the labor force on a strictly numerical basis, not being added to it!
This is in fact much worse than it first appears because the population has grown from 282 million in the year 2000 to approximately 307 million in 2009, a net gain of 25 million people.
Not only have we not returned anyone to the labor force who left on a net basis during the entire 2000-2009 decade but we also added 25 million more people to the population and none of them are working either!
So while the total employed count is back to roughly where we were in March of 2004 when adjusted for population growth we're back where we were in the 1980s in terms of per-capita earnings capacity (ex-inflation of course), but with a spending appetite and debt load that more-correctly approximates 2007! ...
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