Keynesian economic failure in charts !
There is only one chart of employment that truly matters: the number of full-time employees relative to the working age population.
Full-time employment is what ultimately drives economic growth, pays wages that will support household formation and fuels higher levels of government revenue from taxes. If the economy were truly beginning to recover, we should be witnessing an increasing number of full-time employees. Unfortunately, that has not been the case as this measure, as shown by the chart below, is only slightly off the lows witnessed during the financial crisis.
Wages & Salaries
Given that nearly 70% of economic growth is driven by personal consumption expenditures,
the sluggishness of economic growth since the financial crisis can be directly attributed to a fall in personal incomes. According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, median household before-tax incomes have fallen from near $52,000 annually to roughly $47,000 currently.
Financial Security
Another mainstream media theme has been that the surging stock market, driven by the Federal Reserve's monetary interventions, has provided a boost to the overall economy. However, as I have suggested previously, the bulk of the population either does not, or only marginally, participates in the financial markets.
The boost from inflated asset prices driven by Federal Reserve interventions has remained concentrated in the upper 10% of the population. The Federal Reserve study breaks the data down in several ways, but the story remains the same. The median value of financial assets for families has fallen sharply since the turn of the century.
Opportunity
The U.S. economy was built on opportunity.
However, since 2007, opportunity to "own" a business has plunged to the lowest level since 1989. As discussed, the Bureau Of Labor Statistics adjusts to the employment report upward to account for "new business" start-ups. Since 2009, the "birth/death" adjustment has added 3.5 million jobs to the employment roll. The problem, however, is that the number of families that owned business equity has plummeted during that same period.
