Jeff Tucker in Epoch Times: ‘This Is Not A Healthy Job Market’.

“(B)etween June and July, the United States lost half a million full-time jobs. That’s the largest loss in this category since the lockdowns.

Where does this net job creation claim come from? Get this: the same data set reveals that there have been one million new part-time jobs created, for a net of half a million. Multiple job holders soared.

Do you see what’s happening here? It’s no different than cutting a hamburger in half and claiming you just made 100 percent more food.

People are losing full-time work and replacing such jobs with part-time jobs, with people taking two or three to attempt to match the income. In other words, this is a genuine calamity unfolding before our very eyes. And yet, absolutely no one in any official position dares mention it.

The trends are not headed in the right direction, if by that a vibrant job market with high-wage full-time employment. Instead, those jobs are gradually fading and being replaced by gigs and paycheck foraging. The Bureau of Labor Statistics completely obfuscated this alarming trend in their discussion. Even the data bureaus are now thoroughly politicized to the point that you can’t believe what they say.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

As for the wages that people 16 and older are actually earning, they are now at the same rate they were before the lockdowns. The stimulus payment proved to be a short-term fix, a boost of nothing that was quickly taken away by inflation.

Now matter what the White House says now—it’s basically all lies—wages have been in a prolonged state of stagnation ever since the great disaster of March 2020. Very likely, we have not really left that forced recession. There will be no soft landing because there is nothing to land. Most of the growth is fake and wages are stuck in real terms.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

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Whatever happened to progress? What happened to the idea of gradually living better than our parents? That vision is gone in America, especially among young people, replaced by a dour culture of just getting by.

Let’s leave aside the data for now and dig into what life is like for today’s young college graduates. Much depends on training and experience but one case in my mind really sticks out because this young man did everything right from secondary through college and graduate school.

He chose an Ivy education that was very expensive and focused on American and European literature, receiving very high marks throughout college, exactly as high-soaring SATs would have predicted.

At 24 with a master’s degree, he is super well-educated and erudite, not to mention mannerly, mature, and earnest. But now he confronts the one thing that his education never prepared him for: getting a job out of college. It’s incredibly cruel how this works. Once the university has cashed your final check and handed you a degree or two, they completely wash their hands of you.

He has discovered within a few weeks that the job boards like Indeed are completely useless. He sent off 100 well-formed applications with customized resumes. He heard back from 8 of them. Of those he received three interviews, only one of which called him for an in-person interview. That went well, he thought, but never heard back from them, not even so much as a polite no. They ghosted him completely.

So here he is with high credentials, the best possible education, flawless manners and speech, and is unable to get a job that fits with his years of training. In the old world, a person like this would work for a high-end publisher or perhaps an encyclopedia publisher or a cultural publication. Those jobs are in high demand now because there are ever fewer of them. Every institution out there is also hiring from within existing networks of which he is not part.

It doesn’t help that nothing about him checks any of the boxes to enable him to become tokenized in the name of diversity compliance. That’s because he is a white male, which these days serves as a mark against him, as he was daily reminded in college. . .”