More Americans Jobless Than Biden’s Official Unemployment Rate Shows

The labor market is nowhere near as strong as it appears. If that sounds surprising, it’s because the absence of millions of Americans from the workforce artificially lowers the unemployment rate.

Accounting for the missing workers reveals an unemployment rate of over 6%, not the official 3.8%.

To make sense of the numbers, we need to understand what led to today’s labor market conditions. The two-month recession in 2020 wasn’t a normal downturn caused by bad investment, misallocation of capital, and/or overextension of credit. It was an artificial recession caused by the government forcibly shutting down a robust economy during COVID-19, ending a period of both fast growth and low inflation.

Tens of millions of Americans became unemployed in a span of two weeks. But when those artificial constraints were lifted, the labor market came back at the fastest rate ever and quickly was approaching its pre-pandemic trend. This is the opposite of a normal recession, where the labor market slowly accelerates into a recovery.

President Joe Biden inherited an economy that was growing at a $1.5 trillion annualized rate and was adding an average of 1.4 million jobs per month after the government-imposed shutdowns. At the same time, inflation was only 1.4%, below the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

But Biden’s anti-growth, big-government agenda slammed the brakes on the economy and the labor market.

After just 18 months of the Biden administration, inflation soared to 40-year highs, and the economy contracted for two consecutive quarters. Average monthly job growth has slowed 70%, and America remains 4.6 million jobs below its pre-pandemic trend.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of households contains even worse data, showing the number of Americans employed remains 5.5 million below its pre-pandemic trend. The survey also shows a depressed labor force participation rate and a shocking increase in the number of those not in the labor force, relative to February 2020.

Before the government-imposed lockdowns, the number not in the labor force was about 95 million and falling. Since June 2020, however, the level has been stuck around 100 million. That means millions of Americans left the labor market and still haven’t come back, which explains why the ratio of employment to the population also shows a gap of 4.5 million relative to its trend.

These millions of missing workers skew many of the statistics used to gauge the health of the labor market. Imagine a labor force of 100 people wherein 10 are unemployed, giving an unemployment rate of 10%. If one of those unemployed persons leaves the labor force, the unemployment rate drops to 9.1% (with 9 divided by 99).

No jobs were created, but the unemployment rate went down. That’s exactly what’s been happening in the real economy.

Accounting for the millions of people currently excluded from the labor market reveals an unemployment rate between 6.3% and 6.8%, much higher than the official 3.8% rate.

To further illustrate the point, over 700,000 Americans rejoined the labor force last month, in part because families are having trouble making ends meet. Less than a third of them were able to find work, and even fewer found full-time jobs. Yet despite the increase in employment, the unemployment rate rose because so many more people are finally being included in the official number of unemployed.

Yet there are even more indicators showing weakness in the labor market. The number of job openings has plummeted to below the pre-pandemic trend, indicating softening labor demand, which will put downward pressure on wage growth. At the same time, businesses are cutting hours and reducing the number of full-time employees.

As inflation continues to eat into family budgets and more households need a second income, additional people are reentering the labor market, all while businesses are hiring less. That will drive the official unemployment rate much higher and expose this shell game for what it is

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/11/real-unemployment-rate-higher-than-bidens-official-number/ ?

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California Groomin’: Parents and schools are being forced to acquiesce to the “transing” of kids through the strong arm of state law.

California, the most radical of all the blue states, has set yet another horrible precedent for the rest of the country. What has been going on in that state is a pitched battle between parental rights and the faux rights of schools and teachers to hide gender transitions or sexual identities of students from their parents.

Five Golden State school districts — Murrieta Valley Unified School District, Chino Valley Unified School District, Rocklin Unified School District, Temecula Valley Unified School District, and Orange Unified School District — have voted in favor of making it policy for teachers to inform the parents should a child choose to change his or her gender identity.

Last week, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Thomas Garza blocked Chino Valley Unified School District’s new policy from going into effect. Garza claimed that the policy had “no stated, clear purpose” and that it is “singling out a group that is exposed to a clear and present danger.” In other words, Garza is another deluded judicial activist who believes that informing a parent about the radical and harmful decision to adhere to transgender ideology is a suicide risk for the child.

He also justified hiding a gender change by comparing it to hiding a student’s change in religion. It prompts one to wonder if Judge Garza sees radical gender ideology for what it is: a dangerous and harmful cult.

On a larger scale, the state of California is reacting to this push by a handful of school districts for parental rights by passing a horrible piece of legislation. AB 95 passed the State Assembly by a vote of 57-16 and the Senate by a vote of 30-9. This bill is a mandate of sorts that would force parents to affirm their child when he or she decides to declare a different gender. The consequences for not adhering to this new law, set to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom very soon, would be the removal of children from parents’ homes.

How will that work out? Ask Abigail Martinez, whose daughter was removed from her home over this very issue, and later committed suicide.

To add insult to injury, the State Assembly added another liturgical holiday to the cornucopia of LGBTQ+ days of celebration. The Assembly has declared August “Transgender History Month.” (They are going to run out of calendar days at the rate they are declaring new holidays for the new state religion.) It’s as if to say that not only will they take your children away if you don’t comply, but they are going to make sure your kids are thoroughly “educated” in all the LGBTQ+ doctrine.

For anyone who has been watching this debate in California, the surprising part isn’t the new law. The surprising part were the few school districts that wanted to affirm the rights of parents to raise and guide their children. In essence, what the state of California has told parents is “mess around and find out.”

This cult of radical gender ideology has just launched its first religious inquisition. What starts in California will likely spread to other states like a cancer. Parents, if you value both the physical and mental health of your children, get out of that authoritarian state. “If you love your children,” said state Senator Scott Wilk, (R-Santa Clarita) in June, “you need to flee California.”

Democrat lawmakers there are happy to take away your parental rights and your children if you don’t toe the line. They are happy to set your children up for a life of misery and make them vulnerable to predators. There have already been horror stories from parents in other states of what happened to their kids when the state took them away because of this ideology.

That isn’t freedom. It’s tyranny and state-sanctioned child abuse.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/100376-california-groomin-2023-09-12

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Shocking: Virginia Mother Details Nightmare Unleashed By Daughter's Secret In-School Transition

A Virginia mother is suing her local school district in federal court, saying staff there secretly transitioned her daughter, putting her in such dangerous situations that she ran away only to be kidnapped and sex-trafficked. Michele Blair, mother of Sage, filed a lawsuit against the Appomattox County School Board and district staff, as well as Baltimore, Maryland, area public defender Aneesa Khan, who is accused in the lawsuit of conducting a "series of acts aimed at depriving Mrs. Blair of custody of her daughter and keeping [Sage] in Maryland to be affirmed in a male identity."... Blair said her daughter was severely bullied in school, but alleges that the school district withheld information as to why that was happening: the fact that Sage was identifying as a boy in school. "It was verbal, physical, sexually harassed with constant threats of rape by the male classmates," she said of her daughter's 2021 freshman year at Appomattox County High School. "Despite this, the school encouraged her to use the boys' bathroom." Sage had a history of mental health issues including depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and hallucinations, and Blair informed the school of it prior to any of the incidents. However, the school pursued a social transition for Sage behind the back of her parents, the lawsuit filed by the Child & Parent Rights Campaign alleges.

When this child, with a history of mental illness and emotional distress, faced ongoing bullying for her gender transition -- which, again, had not been shared by school officials with her 'non-affirming' parents -- she ran away. Things got much worse:

Vernadette Broyles, Blair's attorney from the CPRC, told the Washington Examiner that Sage ran away from home due to severe bullying and harassment at school. "The school officials were encouraging her to use the boys' bathroom, even though they knew she was being threatened with sexual assault, so she perceived herself that she wasn't safe and she runs away from home," Broyles said. "She runs into the arms of a waiting pedophile, who encounters her, rapes her, traffics her with two other men, and takes her across state lines into Washington, D.C., and then ultimately into Maryland."

This child was eventually recovered by the FBI, but was not returned to her home. Why? According to the lawsuit, a Maryland public defender decided it would not be 'safe,' due to parental opposition to the child's gender transition. Where was young Sage then kept 'safe'?

Broyles explained that the "nightmare should have ended" in Maryland, when Sage was eventually rescued by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, but the Baltimore juvenile court system took custody of the young girl at the behest of Khan. Khan concluded that the Blairs were not "sufficiently affirming" of her new identity, and "concocts a fabricated story of abuse and neglect by the parents and convinces a judge to keep this child in custody," Broyles said. While in custody, Sage was put into a juvenile facility for adolescent males "where she was again sexually assaulted, exposed to drugs, and denied medical and mental health care," the lawsuit states. "This is a 100-pound girl, what do you think happens in this facility?" Broyles said. Sage, again in fear for her safety, ran away from the facility and was again found by another pedophile who brought her to Texas "where she was again raped, drugged, starved, and tortured until law enforcement in Texas rescued her and notified her mother who returned her to Virginia," the lawsuit states.

Having been sexually assaulted and trafficked once already, this 100-pound female was placed not in her own home, but in a males-only juvenile facility, where she was again assaulted. The family's attorney says she then ran away again, resulting in another series of horrors at the hands of a separate pedophile sex trafficker. The state of Maryland's chief public defender told the Examiner that her office "fully support[s] our attorney, who appropriately represented her client in accordance with her legal, ethical, and professional obligations." Youngkin has been highlighting this shocking story for months:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2023/09/12/shocking-lawsuit-virginia-mother-details-nightmare-unleashed-by-daughters-secret-in-school-transition-n2628274

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How the New Deal Harmed Black Americans

A new exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., “Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts, 1932–1962,” provides new evidence that the New Deal was often a raw deal for black Americans. For example, FDR’s housing policy reinforced neighborhood segregation; he refused to support anti-lynching legislation introduced in both the House and the Senate, and, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture now freely admits, his “New Deal was for the most part a bad deal for black farmers,” forcing thousands off their land.

The exhibit leaves out one of the most egregious illustrations of FDR’s dismal record on the Bill of Rights, however: the “policing” of a prominent African-American political leader, Republican J. B. Martin, and the brutal quashing of free speech in Memphis, Tenn., even as President Roosevelt was proclaiming his “four Freedoms”—the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in one’s own way, “the freedom from want,” and the freedom from fear.

Many African Americans regarded Martin as a folk hero. His South Memphis drug store and its black-controlled post-office substation were major sources of pride. Martin and his brothers had one of the first black-owned baseball teams; he built Martin Stadium, home of the local Negro American League baseball club, the Memphis Red Sox, and eventually served as league president.

Martin’s prominence as a Republican leader derived from the peculiarities of Memphis’s political environment. Because of a special arrangement with Edward H. “Boss” Crump, a Democrat and the head of the city’s political machine, Memphis was one of the few places in the South where African Americans still had the franchise. In return for this small measure of freedom, however, Crump manipulated black votes to favor his cronies in Democratic primaries.

A key source of Crump’s power was a cozy alliance with FDR, which was based on raw political calculation and mutual gain. Since 1932, Crump had played the role of an efficient foot soldier at Democratic conventions. In return, Memphis reaped a steady flow of federal funds, which Crump conveniently controlled.

His toleration for “Negro voting” ended abruptly in 1940 after Martin became the local Republican Party chair. Martin’s dream was to build a competitive multiracial party and carry the state for GOP presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, an outspoken champion of civil rights. National polls showed a tight race, and it seemed possible, though unlikely, that Willkie could win Tennessee with the help of Memphis’s African-American voters.

On hearing about Martin’s plans, Crump demanded his resignation and that he shutter the GOP’s local headquarters. When Martin upped the ante by staging a massive Willkie rally, Crump ordered the police to start frisking customers entering Martin’s drug store, using the pretext of uncovering a “dope ring.” Not bothering with such niceties as warrants, Crump openly admitted the true reason for the harassment: “Negroes might as well learn their places.” Martin fled the city rather than face a near-certain sentence in the workhouse. When he briefly returned in 1942 to attend a ball game at Martin Stadium, the police arrested him and ordered him to leave town.

Crump’s outrages were widely denounced, but he knew he had a friend in the White House who had no intention of abandoning him, or of throwing Martin a lifeline.

Despite overwhelming evidence, and the willingness of the head of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice to prosecute Crump, no charges were brought. More than a year later, labor leader and civil-rights activist A. Philip Randolph urged Eleanor Roosevelt to press for a federal investigation. Her curt response came after some delay: “I was advised not to do anything, as it might do more harm than good.” Rather than offend Crump, the president and first lady chose expediency.

The treatment of J. B. Martin provides another illustration of FDR’s abysmal record on the Bill of Rights. It also foreshadowed the extraordinary civil-rights violation yet to come: the February 1942 executive order that led to the mass confinement of Japanese Americans in what FDR himself called “concentration camps.”

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14660&omhide=true&trk=title

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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