re: Record 95,102,000 Americans Not in Labor Force; Up 18% Since Obama Took Office

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"What that means is the low levels of participation we see today are not primarily due to the economic cycle. They're due to a much longer lasting demographic influence," Wolfers said. "It's actually something that's going to continue over the next decade."

Baby boomers – made up of the large subset of Americans born between 1946 and 1964 – dominated the domestic labor market for years. But now that they're leaving the workforce en masse, their exodus has dragged (and will continue to drag) on the country's overall participation rate.

"Baby boomers in a big lump are leaving the labor force. And that explains about half of the drop in the labor force participation rate between 2007 and the end of 2014," says Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor. "The second factor is education – people getting more education and staying in school longer. If you get an MBA, you're out of the labor force for three years. If you get a Ph.D., you're out of the labor force for 5 years, maybe 7 years."

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Yes. Thank you. This is what every single assessment of the Labor Participation Rate says. How in the world do we keep believing that the drop is because people cannot find work who are looking?

The gap in population and jobs has been filled by immigrants, but now they are going to be reduced as well. So, the supply of jobs will go beyond the demand of those looking for work and we will either had contraction of the job market and availability, or automation and outsourcing will continue. But, since jobs can't go overseas anymore, then companies will have to downsize. The difference in supply and demand always creates a recession/contraction of the economy. This is basic economics. But, instead of growing the economy, we are actually moving in a direction of shrinking it all because people are too stupid to understand simple data and facts and because, OH NO!!! Brown people are taking our jobs!!!

A contraction of the supply of workers will not cause wages to go up in the long run. It might create a wage bubble in some fields, but the bubble will burst when their is a shrinking market for products. This will cause the economy to shrink, ultimately. Unless, of course, we are able to increase our markets around the world, but that is unlikely because we are pulling back from global involvement (which will increase instability) and we are going to engage in currency wars and trade wars led by tariffs, driving prices of imports up and making it more expensive for countries to send goods to the U.S. They will close their doors to U.S. products in retaliation and the global economy will slow as "wall" go up everywhere. How do wages rise in that situation? This isn't post WW2 when the industrialized world was in ruins and all that remained was America to rebuild everything. We are in a much different situation than 1945-60. It is shocking that those wanting to MAGA don't seem to realize that.

But, whatever. I'm just a globalist capitalist (or something) who doesn't understand the world.