What Obama’s ‘Job Creation’ Has Done to American Workers

The most sobering view of what is happening in the “Obama recovery,” is what the collapse has done to the American workforce, as evident even in December’s “great” jobs report.

The impact of Obama’s “job creation” was shown by former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts’ analysis of the most recent “wonderful” U.S. jobs report. Of the 292,000 net new jobs supposedly created in December, 151,000 were reported by the Labor Department to be taken by Americans over 55 years of age, in many cases second and third jobs of over-middle-aged workers who lack retirement income to survive on. This continues a pattern for the past 18 months wherein the majority of jobs created in America are taken by 55-plus workers. These tend to be part-time, and low-wage.

Younger workers anywhere from 16-45, Roberts showed, had lesser gains. But workers in their 40s and 50s actually suffered a large net loss of employment in a supposedly very strong employment month; again, a recent pattern, and for several years. These are the middle-aged Americans who had productive, well-paid jobs; shown in a recent and shocking scholarly study, to have had rising death rates for the past 15 years, and essential to have been killing themselves with drugs, alcohol, and suicides.

The fact that real wages declined has become routine in these reports for years; this month, absolute wages declined as well. The jobs, Roberts noted, are “entirely in non-tradable service jobs, which neither create goods or trade nor are affected by it, and whose wages are low. Some 1.185 million fewer Americans were in the workforce in December, than one year earlier.