Unemployment

Thank you for completely abandoning any effort to support your prior bullshit that President Obama keeps saying "how great things are when it comes to unemployment", something he NEVER does.

What do you think President Obama did in 2001 to trigger such a steep drop in the labor force participation rate among the young? A drop that finally leveled off in 2010?

Why are there different %labels on the Left and Right Y axis?

Look at the colors, alanleroy. Left is young people, right is older people.

Right-Side is for the blue/older workers line; Left-Side is for the green/young workers line.

Both sides are linear and the scale of both sides is the same; the Right-Side is raised so the change in Older/Younger Labor Participation relative to one another is clear.

Right. My question was why. I can't think of a good reason to not use a single scale on a chart like this. It would also be helpful to see workers between 24 & 55 and to see the actual numbers on each category....otherwise you don't really get a good clue as to what's happening. For example if 90% of the labor force is between 24 & 55 and 8% over 55 and 2% 16-24, the big decline in 16-24 rates could be non material.

It makes the graph smaller, that's likely the only reason. It'd be a lot taller otherwise.

Think of it as two graphs laid on top of one another, that's all.

DonDiego doesn't understand the question. He never placed blame on anyone. He's not sure if "blame" is even the right word. But since Chilcoot asked, . . . around the year 2000 Barack Obama was in the Illinois Senate working on setting the record for voting "present".

DonDiego doesn't have a definitive answer as to why the Young Labor Participation Rate has declined since 2000. If he were forced to guess . . . he might suppose increased college enrollment took folks out of the labor pool.
Here's some numbers from the National Center for Educational Statistics
DonDiego leaves as an exercise for the reader to determine how much the rise in enrollment from 8,581,000 in 2000 to 20,994,000 in 2012 contributed to the labor-pool-decline.

DonDiego agrees wholeheartedly with the esteemed alanleroy.
More data would provide more information; that's why DonDiego stated it was a "clue", suggesting the likely answer was not increasing retirement rates.

Poor old DonDiego can't do E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G !

Don Diego's graph says alot. People are not retiring. They're staying in the workforce longer than their historical average. Did they lose their money in the recession? Is their house underwater? Did they suck at saving? Did they have a crappy job that didn't pay them enough to save? Or do they just love to work?
Probably many examples of each. Regardless - every working old person keeps a job from a younger person. This is a new dynamic.

THe government cant (nor should it) force people to retire. It cant force people to save money in their younger years. All the government can do is create an environment for job growth. 3 million jobs have been created under this administration. That is a significant amount - especially considering the starting point and a record amounf of obstruction from a Congress that cant focus on anything beyond repealing the health law.

Job creation has not been the problem. Find the answer as to why people are retiring later and you will identify what is.

I think I have a clue!