The Spectacular Myth of Obama's Part-Time America—in 5 Graphs
A falsifiable claim, falsified
Derek Thompson
If you've been paying attention to a certain slice of the financial media—see: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Fox News—you know for a fact that Obama and his health care law have tag-teamed with global economic trends to drive America inexorably toward a part-time economy.
This is a testable claim. So let's test it.
The first thing you would expect to see from a Part-Time America is that the number of part-time jobs added would rival the number of full-time jobs added. But in the last year, new full-time jobs outnumbered part-time jobs by 1.8 million to 8,000. For every new part-time job, we're creating 225 full-time positions.
Okay, but one year is just one year! Let's keep looking.
<...>
Okay, well, raw numbers can be deceiving. After all, the labor force has declined since 2010. So let's graph these part-time workers as a share of the labor force. Surely that will show a rising line...
- more -
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-spectacular-myth-of-obamas-part-time-america-in-5-graphs/283674/
= new reply since forum marked as read
In the meantime - a pleasure to give you a rec for stopping nonsense in it's tracks. 
As of the most recent data released by the BLS for January 2014, there were 117,656,000 full time employed in the US. Last time we had this many full time employed was December 2008 when we had 117,096,000 and were heading down to a low of 110,559,000 in December 2010. Last time we hit 117,656,000 on the way up was November 2005 when we had full time employed of 117,580,000. All we have to do is create another 4,200,000 full time jobs and we will be back to the pre-recession high point of 121,875,000 full time employed in November 2007.
?g=rY7
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=rY7
So, with 117,656,000 full time employed, we are back to full time employment levels of December 2008. Unfortunately there are over 12,000,000 more people age 20 and over ( the kind of people you might expect to be employed full time ) today than there were in December 2008.
by Bill McBride
Payroll employment is getting close to the pre-recession peak...this doesn't include population growth and new entrants into the workforce (the workforce has continued to grow), but reaching new highs in employment will be a significant milestone in the recovery.
The graph below shows both total non-farm payroll (blue, left axis) and private payroll (red, right axis) since January 2007. Both total non-farm and private payroll employment peaked in January 2008.
The dashed line is the pre-recession peak.
The pre-recession peak for total non-farm payroll employment was 138.365 million. Currently there are 137.499 million total non-farm payroll jobs, or 866 thousand fewer than the pre-recession peak...The pre-recession peak for private payroll employment was 115.977 million. Currently there are 115.686 million total non-farm payroll jobs, or 291 thousand fewer than the pre-recession peak. It seems likely private sector employment that will be at a new high by March.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/02/when-will-payroll-employment-exceed-pre.html
"All we have to do is create another 4,200,000 full time jobs and we will be back to the pre-recession high point of 121,875,000 full time employed in November 2007."
...numbers are off. The pre-recession high was 138.3 million and the number is currently at 137.4 million, short about 866,000.
To get back to full employment related to population growth would require about 7.6 million jobs.
http://www.epi.org/blog/december-2007-level-employment-benchmark/
All Employees: Total nonfarm (PAYEMS)
2014-01: 137,499 Thousands of Persons
The data from 2008 to 2014:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=rYZ
