This comparable Chart also from the St. Louis Fed, here.
(If that last chart is extended backward in time to the default 1948 timeframe, the trending effect of women in a spousal pair entering the workforce to achieve double income to keep up, in increasing numbers with time, is apparent up to the present depression-related employment drop-off.)
Next we might focus yet more upon the late 2008 time frame (where the housing bubble was made to splat in the late lame duck Bush second term autumn-winter), and to look at the charts in light of these Fed memos; telling an incomplete propagandized/sanitized story perhaps; here (from the Geithner NY Fed), here, here, here, here, and, recently, here.
Bernanke's hands on the levers continued after 2008, despite election results as a judgment of late Bush events; and Geithner was put into the Treasury by B. H. Obama - with his NY Fed ties and all.
The Fed policy from then late in 2008 has consistently been one instituted then, and onward, to discourage credit and lending, and to encourage parked big-bank reserves instead of money circulating productively as is normal in the economy via interbank lending and credit then to the private sector. Credit is dry, excess reserves are parked to earn risk-free interest, jobs are gone -- all so the dollar can be cheapened on the international stage with food and other commodity prices jacking up, but without "inflation" [which in Fed-speak as best as I can read things means that wages are staying frozen because people are put into hyper-fear mode over jobs they may still hold and you don't see unions striking after the Scott Walker gaming, etc.].
An inverted and perverted Robin Hood regime, steal from the poor and give to the rich. Or not?
Think about it. Are we being lied to and fleeced? Go figure. Was that "debt ceiling" grifter show a pile of hooey, with Ron Paul there correctly saying the Fed could cancel the treasury bonds it held and that would create $1.6 trillion of immediate debt relief. (But the banks would not have things as cozy.)
Now, we see a quality American, not some phony horn-tooting "Patriot" of the Tea Party persuation or otherwise, saying, simply and bluntly, guarantee Social Security solvency and quit screwing around (and quit lying hither and yon). Does the "Keeping the Social Security Promise Act" ring your bell? Or was it a false charade all along, never a promise at all?
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There is a comparable employment chart on Brad DeLong's blog banner area, here.
___________UPDATE___________
There is more. Here. My favorite subtopics there, sequentially, here and here. Please do check that linkover, and read the, "Comments on the interim final rule, identified by Docket No. R-1334." (The easiest thing, do a page search on the linkover page for R-133).
____________FURTHER UPDATE___________
There is more. This link, for this beginning excerpt:
The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man A smaller share of men have jobs today than at any time since World War II by Mike Dorning - Thursday, August 25, 2011 As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.Does anyone have any questions, so far?
If that sounds bleak, it's because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job. Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. [...]
photo credit, here
