Bad News For The WLB

[Minimalist]

Of course, he will simply denounce this as Fake Math.... but if we are at Full Employment we need more immigrants - not less.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/upsho...ss&emc=rss

We May Be Closer to Full Employment Than It Seemed. That’s Bad News.

The May job numbers raise a depressing possibility: that this is as good as it will get for the United States labor market.

At first glance, the new numbers seem like a bit of a mystery. The unemployment rate fell to a 16-year low, yet job creation slowed and the number of people who are neither working nor looking for work rose. But the data aren’t really inconsistent. Rather, they point to a job market that is pretty close to full employment — where workers who want a job can find one fairly easily, but low unemployment isn’t pulling workers into the labor force en masse.

From the state of Maine comes this little tidbit, though.  The governor has begun pardoning convicts so they can rejoin the labor force!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/us/ma...oners.html

Maine’s Governor Wants Inmates to Fill Jobs, Not Prison Beds

During radio interviews this week, Mr. LePage suggested his push for commutations was not a sudden shift in his views on the criminal justice system. Instead, he said, he is trying to solve the aging state’s mounting labor problem. The released offenders will be required to find jobs or job training.

“The tourist industry is struggling, can’t find enough workers,” Mr. LePage, a Republican who has been in office for six years, said on Tuesday on the radio station WVOM. “We are looking at every corner of the state to try to put people back to work. That’s what the commutation program’s all about.”

Once again, the problem is demographics not economics although it is hard to separate the two.