April Jobs Report: The Labor Participation Rate Is Back Where It Was in December 1981

More on the labor market picture, from the Wall Street Journal, "The Vanishing Workers":

The economy turned in another lackluster month for job creation in April, with 115,000 net new jobs, 130,000 in private business (less 15,000 fewer in government). The unemployment rate fell a tick to 8.1%, albeit mainly because the labor force shrank by 342,000. This relates to what is arguably the most troubling trend in the April jobs report, which is the continuing decline in the share of working-age Americans who are in the labor force.

The civilian labor participation rate, as it's known, fell again in April to 63.6%. That's the second decline in a row and the lowest rate since December 1981. That's right—more than 30 years ago, longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The nearby chart shows the disturbing round trip the workforce participation rate has taken since 1980 and the precipitous drop in the last three years.

This decline is highly unusual coming out of a recession. Normally as hiring picks up, more Americans see more job opportunities and jump back into the labor force. That's what happened after the sharp recession of 1981-82, when the participation rate last hit 63.6%.

It rose smartly through the boom of the 1980s to a peak of 66.8% in January 1990. The rate dipped to 66% in the mild 1991 recession, but then rose again through the 1990s to a modern peak of 67.3% in January 2000 at the top of the dot-com bubble.

The last decade has never reached the same heights, though the participation rate did rise back to 66.4% in late 2006 and early 2007. The rate fell to 65.7% in July 2009 when the last recession officially ended, yet the distressing fact is that it has kept falling over the course of the next 33 months of ostensible economic recovery.

The trend deserves deeper economic study, though we can offer a few of the likelier explanations. One may be demographic as the baby boom generation gets closer to retirement age. Economist David Malpass notes that Americans age 55 and older are a rapidly rising share of the working-age population, a trend that has historically meant a lower overall labor participation rate....

The tragedy of the Obama Administration is that it put the political pursuit of its social welfare agenda above policies to nurture a strong, durable economic expansion. Americans are paying for that mistake in less work and less reward for the work they get. The priority of the next Administration must be to reverse the decline.

And that ought to be a Romney administration, frankly. This president cannot make the case for his economic policies so he continues to issue bizarre and Orwellian campaign slogans and imaginary government dependency robots.

If Obama wins, it won't because the left has been decent or honest --- and because certainly the right will have been much too decent, like in 2008, when McCain refused to attack Obama for the statist that he is.

See also, James Pethokoukis, "The awful April jobs report: Is the ‘real’ unemployment rate 11.1%?"

PREVIOUSLY: "Romney Slams Obama Over Disastrous April Jobs Report."