Critiquing misleading White House statements about the economy, part 4
From Economic Policy Institute:
This Snapshot is part of a series; see also part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the series, or print the entire series.
The unemployment rate of 4.7% in April remains slightly above the rate at the peak of the last business cycle (4.3 % in March 2001).
Since persons not looking for work are excluded from this measure, when potential workers give up looking for work and leave the job market, the unemployment rate does not fully reflect labor market slack.
This rate is down 1.3 percentage points of its value at the last business cycle peak in March of 2001.
Notably, the employment rate is even more depressed-down 1.9 percentage points-for college graduates, a group whose job prospects are presumably not limited because of any changes in skills required in the job market.
According to research by EPI, were job creation occurring at a similar rate as the last recovery, employment growth would be about 300,000 jobs per month as opposed to the current underlying trend of about 200,000 jobs per month (though last month's job gains were an off-trend 138,000).
Finally, as shown in the first Snapshot of this series, real earnings have been falling in recent quarters, strong evidence that we have not yet achieved a full-employment job market.
Read more from this post.
