IOWA!

The 2.5 growth is quite significant when it's translated into the numbers of people. I wonder how many that represents?

It's probably a big number, but the rise of the 15-55 statistic over the past severn years is small and its current value relatively low compared to the past 20 years depicted in the chart.

That of course is not the way Blickers describes it. However my observation is true nevertheless.

Considering that the only states where this is the case are Hawaii, Texas New Mexico, and California, it won't be until March 1st that this could have any impact on the race and Texas is only one of 15 locales that will be deciding anything on Super Tuesday.

I imagine that American Samoa doesn't have a white majority and the Dems there caucus on March 1st (with only 10 delegates at stake) Washington DC of course is not a state, but it has a black majority and more Dem delegates at stake (46) than there are in New Hampshire (32) and almost as many as were in play in Iowa (52). However they don't join the fray until June when the nomination will, in all likelihood, have been sewed up for months. I'm surprised they don't make more noise about the timing of their primary. Clearly, the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire have a much more substantial impact on the race than does D.C. and unlike South Carolina (February 27th) and a bunch of states in the Super Tuesday contests, IA and NH have very small minority populations (IA is 88% White and NH is 92%) and in both, Hispanics outnumber Blacks. The Black Vote isn't going to have any appreciable influence on the race until the SC (27%) primary. Even in SC though Whites are well in the majority (64%). It's not until March 1st that the state with the largest % of black citizens gets involved: Georgia with 31%.

I'm sure your point was that that minority voters are not much of a factor in the two states where Sanders has and will do well, that they will be in future primaries and that this will be to the advantage of HRC, but we should keep in mind that the Clinton/Minority relationship, such as it remains, is more pronounced among Blacks than Hispanics, and I'm also sure you would be the last person to suggest that all Blacks think alike or all Hispanics think alike, let alone that all minorities think alike.

On Super Tuesday there will be more states where Hispanics outnumber Blacks than the other way around. In addition, the number of Hispanics living in all of these states exceeds the combined population of Black citizens by 27.5%. That's not an insignificant number.

I'm sure HRC is polling better among Blacks than Sanders and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true among Hispanics, but as noted, the Clinton hold on the former is greater than it is on the latter and there is only the most superficial of arguments to be made against Sander with these blocs (to the extent they vote as such) and that is that he doesn't have a long history of helping minority constituents because he has virtually no such constituency. Not being a huge fan of HRC, I can't quote chapter and verse what she has done for minorities when she was a Senator from NY, but I would be surprised if she can trot out achievements at the national level that clearly exceed those of Sanders.

It would take quite a smear campaign to paint Bernie Sanders as a racist, but if anyone can do it, it will be the Clinton Machine. Far more likely though will be the effort to portray him as someone who is out of touch with minority issues and that he doesn't really care, because he's never had to. There's no obvious reason though that The Bern will appeal any less to minority Democrat voters than it has to white Democrats. HRC has an advantage with minorities, but then going into this thing she had a huge advantage with women voters and Sanders (or what he seems to personify) has done a great job in that respect.

Therein lies the very big problem for Clinton. The huge advantages she carried into this race are not only not holding up for her, they have turned into liabilities.

The race is not all about the personal campaigning skills of either candidate and to a large extent she should be happy about that because hers are lousy. She got elected to the Senate in New York based on name recognition, not accomplishments or campaigning skills. NY has always been a sucker for the Big Name candidate and New Yorkers are only too happy to elect a Carpet-bagger if they have a Big Name. Except for those who live in areas that border Massachusetts, New Yorkers hate that state, because they hate Boston, and they hate Boston because they hate its sports teams. That Robert Kennedy, a guy whose accent dripped with Boston cod and beans, got elected proves my contention.

Hillary on the stump isn't even in the same city, let alone the same league as her husband Bill and for some stupid reason of pride or arrogance, it doesn't appear that she has been willing to take his advise. She was never going to be able to charm and entrance voters though. That was never more obvious that when she ran against Obama and lost, but even grumpy, rumpled old Bernie Sanders has her beat on this score. I'm not all ears when a socialist with a grunting NYC accent is giving a speech, but even I can tell he's not only a better campaigner that the wooden, strident Clinton, he come across as more sincere.

Like in 2008, Clinton is relying on the acceptance, by Democrat voters, of the myth that she was Bill's Eleanor and that she has a liberal legacy all her own that goes beyond standing by her man (could that be more ironic?) and holding two important political positions: NY Senator and Secretary of State, not-with-standing that she wasn't any great shakes with either of them. How could she be? They were never important positions to her except for the fact that they were stepping stones to the one position that has been the focus of her life for decades.

Beyond all this though is the one fact that she has believed, and I'm sure still does, is going to give her the keys to the White House, that she's a woman. In 2008 it was her misfortune to come up against a member of a minority that her party, with identity politics at it's core, felt has first dibs over women (that and the fact that he was an infinitely better campaigner), but now she's running against an old white man who is a member of a minority that has been more devoted to the Democrat Party than any other, but which is never given a spot in the line of groups owed. Isn't it peculiar that there has been virtually no talk at all about Sanders becoming the first Jewish president America has ever elected?

So, to my thinking, there's no small amount of justice in the fact that this old Jew who has been a slogging leftist for all of his life and who is so enamored of the politics of the Left that he went to Russia on his honeymoon is actually taking a huge chunk of the women's vote from a woman who talks a good game about being in the trenches for all these years, but who, in reality, is only in the position to be elected president of the USA because she married William Jefferson Clinton.

Who honestly thought Bernie would take the youth vote and with it a great segment of the women's vote away from Hillary? If someone had predicted this 18 months ago they would have been considered nuts. Don't be surprised if and when he steals the minority vote from her too, and who honestly thought that another "advantage" on which she has been relying, and which she has been working on building since she and Bill left the White House: Being a mover and shaker in her party and in DC, would turn out to be a liability? When she denied being a member of The Establishment, I laughed out loud but when she said that she wasn't committed to running for president when she tool the Goldman Sachs fees I nearly choked.

Hillary Clinton couldn't be a more perfect main character in a Greek tragedy, and this drama is going to play out in the same way.

If the rise is small then wouldn't that also make the difference between the current rate and the 2007 rate also small? They are almost the exact same number.

Quote georgeob1:

Sorry george, but charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics don't count as "speculations", even if they disagree with your conclusions.

Quote georgeob1:

Well, george, how about the Bureau of Labor Statistics? This whole disagreement about the Labor Force Participation Rate started when you pooh-pooh'ed Cicernone Imposter's observation that the unemployment rate was the lowest since the crash. You "corrected" CI by bringing up the Labor Force Participation Rate, which you said was not so good. However, this is the first sentence from Employment Situation Summary release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Bureau of Labor Statistics Summarized:

Since an official summary puts the most important facts first, we can surmise that the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures the most important gauges of the employment situation are:
A) Number of jobs created or lost
B) Unemployment Rate

Know when the Labor Force Participation Rate gets mentioned in the official summary george? Paragraph 5. And it isn't even the first sentence of Paragraph 5, it's in the middle. Which means that Cicerone Imposter was using a measure the BLS considers hugely important, and you tried to overrule him with a statistic that the BLS considers not so important at all.

The way I see it is that if you can claim that a statistic that the BLS puts way down in Paragraph 5 somehow overrules Cicerone Imposter's First Sentence statistic, I should have no trouble using a statistic that the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't list in its summary at all, (but which still is an official BLS statistic), to overrule your fifth rate stat.

It all comes down to what the reader thinks. If you think that a chart showing that the percentage of employed people who are in the prime of their earning years is increasingly rapidly the last few years has no significance as the country recovers from a loss of 11 Million jobs in 2008-9, so be it. I think the majority of readers will find it quite significant. Why? Because usually it is more important to be working in the middle part of your life than it is to be working between 16-24. That's why people go to college, george. And high school and college students are not exempted from your Labor Force Participation Rate statistic either-they are simply counted as people not participating in the labor force. So when you decry the decline in the overall Labor Force Participation Rate, in large part you are decrying the increase in the percentage of 16-24 years olds who stay in high school and go Full-Time to college. Not good.

Quote georgeob1:

You mean like this? It's the chart of the Employment-Population Ratio for ages 25-54, the prime of one's working years.

Yes, that one (and others). It shows that the feaction of the cadre employed has recovered about half of the losses incurred in the 2008 recession - not much of asn aschievement by U.S. historical standards after eight years of recovery; the rate levelled off in 2015 as our "recovery" loses moimentum; and it is well below its valuers for all of the fifteen yraed prior to the resession.

The only remarkable thing here is that you cite it as a measure of success.

What do you consider a "measure of success?"

A nonsensical and very petty question. The answer is quite obvious.

Quote georgeob1:


Umm, what chart are you looking at? You might want to consult an optometrist for a new prescription. I took just the last 3 years to show there is no visible momentum being lost as the Employment-Population Ratio increases steadily:



Quote georgeob1:

Say what? Obama took office right in the middle of the biggest economic setback since The Great Depression, stopped the economy from plummeting, and turned the economy around to where it is adding jobs a great rate. I didn't think it was necessary to add some graphics to explain this, I thought you were up to date on current events, but I think you need a little visual aid to put into perspective Obama's performance:



As you can see, not only has Obama more than undone the precipitous drop in Employment-Population Ratio for ages 25-54 that continued into his term, he has the ratio rocketing up so that in a couple of years we will have undone the larger part that occurred on Bush's watch as well. Coupled with the 2.5 Million Full Time jobs created in the last 12 months and the 5 Million Full Time jobs created in the last two years, that's an excellent performance any way you look at it. But I just posted the chart so that everybody can look at it and judge for themselves.

According to BLS, the labor force participation rate has been dropping.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

the chart you picked doesn't take out people who've aged out of the labour force

How do you know that? You'll have to ask BLS if you question 'their' numbers.

We know that because the BLS tells us that.

Are people that are over 80 over the age of 16? Are people that are over 65 over the age of 16.

The BLS chart specifically states "over the age of 16". It says nothing about also under the age of 65 or 80 or any other maximum age. Looking further into the BLS explanations it tells us it uses everyone over the age of 16 not institutionalized or in the military.


This will give you a breakout that shows they include over 75 in the totals of 16 and over.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.pdf

Here it is (just click the link)

http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_LNS11300000_2006_2016_all_period_M01_data.gif


No evidence there of any continuing rise.

Here's the full story on the drop in labor participation rate.
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/03/declining-labor-participation-rates/
Re: Baby boomers.

That's great McGentrix. Your chart shows the percentage of people who are either employed or unemployed is dropping. My chart shows the percentage of people between 25 and 54-the heart of one's working life-who are employed is rapidly rising.

Conclusion? There's a smaller percentage of people who are unemployed all the time. And Republicans think that's bad.

What a party!

No you've got it wrong. The statistic counts the number of people who are either employed or unemployed, but still seeking work. Those who have given up and for any reason dropped out of the workforce are not counted. THAT is the whole point of the statistic and the ensuing discussion, and it is one you have persistently refused to face.

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/trump-wildly-inflates-unemployment/

I think I found out where some of those numbers are coming from