…in employment history, presented pictorially.
Notice that: the share of working-age Americans had started to fall the year before the Panic of 2008, and it started to fall sharply a few months prior to the Panic’s official start. Those are economic lags working through the system.
The problem is, the share of potential workers actually working has remained static at its historic low of roughly 58.5% ever since. That’s not economic lag, that’s failed economic policies over the last several years.
This is commonly known as The Rest of the Story,
the part the current administration wants to ignore.
After the dot.com crash took a bunch of people out of the workforce, then 9-11, things were finally turning around under GWs first term and improved some, but not back to pre-2000 numbers.
But since the democrats took control of congress things have not been doing so well.
That’s generally been the case, at least since the Wilson years: the economy, if not suffers, fails to prosper, when the Democrats have control.
Eric Hines