Friday's jobs report shows that around 93.8 million Americans have dropped out of the work force, which is a record.
Here's the breakdown from CNS News:
A record 93,770,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month, and the labor force participation rate remained at 62.6 percent, exactly where it was in June -- a 38-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday.
In 1975, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping such records, 58,627,000 Americans were not in the labor force, and the number has grown steadily since then, breaking the 80-million mark at the end of George W. Bush's presidency; and the 90-million mark in July 2013, during Barack Obama's second term. The number of Americans not in the labor force has continued to rise since then.
In addition, there are currently 56,209,000 women 16 years and older who are no longer in the workforce, which is also a record.
The decline of workers in the workforce is clearly a trend, and not a good one. ZeroHedge has a graph showing that this is similar to the economy in 1977:
It should also be noted that the jobs report showed that 215,000 jobs were created, which was around what economists had expected. The U3 unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.3%. The U6 unemployment rate- which includes those who have dropped out of the workforce as well as those who are underemployed- is at 10.4%, a slight drop from 10.5% in June.
And of the job gains, most of them were older workers:
As we expected, more than all job gains, or 211,000 of the total, came in the 55 and over job category. Workers 16-24 lost a total of 8,000 jobs. And the worst hit were, who else, those in their prime, as the number of workers aged 25-54 dropped by another 131K.
That's a disturbing trend. The rise in workers 55 and older indicates that senior citizens are unable to retire. Meanwhile, that means fewer jobs for those of us in the rising generation- a term coined by Mark Levin to better describe millennials.
Clearly, the economy is not getting better, and this should be the number one issue that the 2016 presidential candidates should focus on.