Economic Rebound in Doubt as 10 Percent of All US Workers Employed Just ‘Part-Time’
From Gene J. Koprowski’s article in The Daily Caller:
“The ‘recovery’ is weak and may sputter,” Hans Bader, a scholar and economics expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told TheDC. “Labor force participation is low, lower than when Obama took office, suggesting the real unemployment rate is much higher than official estimates.”
[…]
In another subtle signal of economic disquiet, Bader, who formerly worked at the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), noted that more Americans are these days going onto Social Security Disability, claiming they are suffering from long-term mental illnesses, like depression.
These individuals receive a monthly disability check from the government, and are not included in statistics on unemployment, Bader says. The cost to the U.S. federal budget is now some $200 billion a year for these disability claims, according to a report by JP Morgan Chase. That figure is more than the budgets for seven major federal agencies — Justice, State, Energy, and others — combined.