Employment versus unemployment

A Scary Vision
Here’s a chart that paints an extremely eerie – but realistic – picture of what is happening in America.
Take a look:

This chart represents true US employment. It shows how many people are employed vs. the overall population.
It does a far better job at showing the reality of employment than the unemployment rate that every one talks about.
About ten years ago employment growth stalled, gradually widening the gap between total US population and US employment.
Stimulus measures were put in place as a result, and as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan (needed) to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
While stimulus created a strong housing market – which eventually popped in 2007 – it didn’t do much to create new jobs, as you can see in the chart above.
Total US employment has actually been declining over the last decade, while population growth continues to expand (as it always will.)
Herein lies a major problem.
More resources and jobs are required to fuel population growth. We’ll need more food, more commodities…more of everything.
Americans need jobs to pay for those things.
But even with record amounts of stimulus over the past decade, America hasn’t been able to create more jobs. Stimulus hasn’t created jobs in over 10 years; it has only created the illusion of wealth through inflated asset prices.
This is a major predicament that has yet to be brought into the spotlight.
Instead, talking heads can continue talking about the unemployment rate, which – as I just explained – really has no merit.
With a declining workforce, low wage job creation, and growing population, the need for additional public expenditure grows dramatically.
Big Government Gets Bigger
Take a look:

This is a chart of government transfers to individuals, with the majority (nearly 90%) coming from income maintenance (entitlements based on poverty or income status), Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance.
As this spending continues to grow, so will the need for government income.
But since government income generally comes from taxation (see How the Government Borrows Money), the hope of lowering public debt is practically non-existent.
Public debt will continue to balloon as the population grows while the workforce shrinks.
What’s worse is that I am not sure which sector will provide enough jobs to fuel population growth. As I mentioned in “A Really Big Problem”:
“Innovation is human evolution. Yet as we advance in technology, more jobs will be destroyed and replaced by more efficient robotics and digital technology. Movies where humans lose their jobs to robots and technology are no longer fiction – its reality.
Manufacturing has long moved to emerging markets where costs of production are far below anything in N. America. That means the technology created here are sent overseas to be mass produced.”